After reading through the End-to-End traceability documentation our team is finding it difficult to accomplish the final step in this list:
Developers create a branch or PR on a work item (in this case, a Task)
When the PR is completed and the branch merged, the work item shows the build
When the build artifact is released, the work item shows the deployment environments
All of that works great, but the final step is:
Show the builds and deployments on all parent tasks of the work item i.e., the Feature work item and the User Story work item.
Is that not possible? Or is there a rule or template that we could write that would automatically copy development links up the hierarchical chain so that developers and business can see the traceability across all associated work items?
Conversely, are we intended to manually link all development links to all work items?
Based on my understanding, you want parent work items to display builds and deployments tracked by child work items.
Testing on my side, the parent work items will not show the builds and deployments tracked by the child work items. DevOps currently does not support such feature.
We recommend that you could request this feature on: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/report?space=21&entry=suggestion. Voting helps increase the priority of the issue by consolidating customer impact under one feedback.
Related
Since the process of one A/B test usually takes multiple sprints I would like to add another board in which I can add the A/B tests (as F.E. features). User stories for one sprint can then be added to a specific sprint for my team (which consists of a few specialists and a developer). This way I am able to overview the status (research phase, test , code writing, running, analysis, etc.) of all tests in one overview. I have not been able to find out how this is possiblie within Azure Devops, or if there is a work around. Can anyone help me?
My team also works in projects other than A/B tests, which means we cannot use the boards section.
Unless there is a hidden way to add another board to a team?
You could Copy or clone a work item to add the user stories or tests to a new boards. Open the user story you want to clone, then click Create copy of work item and choose whether to include exist links, attachments and child work items. After creating, change the Area and Iteration to your target boards.
Update
In Azure DevOps you can only create boards by creating a team. The team board is created as a side-effect of creating the team. Please refer to Manage and configure team tools and Configure and customize Azure Boardsfor details.
After creating and configuring a new team, you could see the boards in the dropdown list.
I come from using Rally and Pivotal Tracker. In both I could assign work items to Releases as a planning tool, and to have a historical record of those work items that were deployed.
Even with all the highly-specific guidance from Microsoft about Azure DevOps, it is silent how to organize work against future Releases. I can't see a place to even associate a work item to a Release. Is there something I am missing in all the documentation, or is there some workaround strategy more robust than just using tags to pro-actively plan against releases? Or is Microsoft's expectation that I use some separate product management tool to manage work items against Releases?
There are multiple techniques employed to accomplish this, not "one way":
use a parent iteration path that groups the iterations you plan against a certain release. This works best when you completely finish one release before starting the next. Otherwise, it usually becomes a mess with multiple active iterations.
Backlog Iteration
+ Release 1.0
+ Sprint 1
+ Sprint 2
+ Sprint 3
+ Release 2.0
+ etc
-
use tags for releases. Add a tag [Release 1.0] top all work items that are included in that release, this is one of the most flexible options.
use Azure Pipelines to keep track of which Work Items were associated to which Git commits and thus was included in which Build artifact. Track the build artifacts across environments to see which work items were deployed to an environment by looking at the intermediate builds.
add a custom work item field to the work item types you want to track. You can change the work item process being used and you can add a field to the work items in which you can specify the release name/number. There are custom controls available that can scope the version numbers to a specific list or can fetch the allowed values from any REST API.
Azure DevOps is more flexible in the usage patterns as you can see, but it also means that sometimes you need to "figure out what works best" for your team.
Another extension you may be interested in is the Bravo Notes extension. Or one of the other extensions that can generate Release Notes based on you work item data, commits and/or pipeline artefacts.
In Jira, you can create Releases for a project. As part of a Release, you can specify which issues are part of it as well as add Release notes.
These are extremely useful when you have automated build scripts, as the API for JIRA can be queried by the scripts as part of a CD pipeline.
You can therefore do things like (but not limited to):
Fill in a changelog dynamically
Stop deployment if there are an issues part of the Release that are not Done
Retrieve version numbers
Question: Is there a VSTS equivalent?
I do not think there is currently anything directly comparable to a Jira 'release' built into Azure Devops, which would allow you to package up completed Work Items on a board into a 'Release' work item.
You could implement a "poor man's" version of this by creating a custom process for your project that included a new 'Release' work item type. Each 'Release work item' could then be manually linked to work items you want to include in that release and could contain custom fields for the 'version' number or any other meta data you wanted to store with that release. This could then later be queried from a CD pipeline which, taking one of your examples, would allow you to do something like iterate over the linked work items for the release and make sure they are in a 'done' status.
Edit: As an example of integration techniques, the REST API for Azure DevOps supports a simple REST GET request to query all work items in a project for a custom work item type:
GET https://dev.azure.com/{organization}/{project}/_apis/wit/reporting/workitemrevisions?types={YourCustomWorkItemType}&includeLatestOnly=true&api-version=4.1
The API will also return any custom fields you have associated with this WIT, listing them under the key 'Custom.{YourFieldName}' within the "fields" object of the WIT response.
If your team was working with sprints, the other potential method I could think of to do this would be for each 'sprint' to become a named version which would become your 'release' once the sprint was complete. Work items that were not implemented as part of that sprint/version/release) would then be moved into the next sprint or closed. I'm not sure this approach would be very sustainable for complex projects.
There are features of interest listed on the Azure Devops Features Timeline that may improve this workflow in the near future (for example, "Release traceability – Work Item integration", planned for implementation in 2018 Q4), although it's difficult to find out any implementation details.
Still new to VSTS. Sometimes work or requests come in and our team needs a way of sorting these into areas that will become projects, but not immediately. Can I create a task without first creating a new team project?
Also, is there a way to see different projects at a higher level than the tasks in one view on a kanban board? Ive seen some delp docs on dashboards etc, but everything including tasks are all scoped to a team project. While this makes sense to have these things for a project, but what about higher level views? At any one time, there might be 4-5 different projects being worked on as well as 2-3 different things that are not part of a project yet. Maybe VSTS isnt the place for these more general items, but a generic kanban board?
The term "team project" is kind of an antiquated name that doesn't do a great job of accurately describing its purpose. Think of a "team project" as a portfolio of related applications rather than something for a single team, or a single project.
The most common way to address is this to keep everything in a single team project. There are a lot of things that don't cross team project boundaries, and trying to force that behavior is a recipe for frustration.
Within a team project, you can create Teams. Each team can have its own backlog, its own iteration schedule, etc. Teams are assigned an area path that they own. If a work item is under their area, it's assigned to that Team.
If you have Team A's area path set to FooProject/Team A, then it belongs to that team. A work item under FooProject/Team A shows up on that Team's backlog.
From there, you can adjust security permissions and such so that if a person isn't a member of a given Team, they don't have access to see or manipulate other teams' work items.
Is there a way to share Epic/Feature/Stores between Team.
We have the Following Teams
1) PM, BA, DEV, Testing for most of the projects.
For a given userStory that might be tasks that are done by BA and only visible to them. But when their work is completed for that user Stories DEV team will pick up and create their own Task for that same user Story that BA team worked upon.
Similarly, when the Dev Task is completed Testing team will create other Task under that story.
How do i organize such a setup in VSTS so that I don't have to duplicate user stories/epic and features between team ?
In VSTS, you probably want to define your own workflow stages, which will be the columns on the Kanban board view. Your stages sounds something like Analysis, Dev, Test, etc.
This way, as each team member wants to progress the task, they will update the work item to the next work stage and likely reassign the task to a new team member.
See these articles for more details (which provide an example workflow very similar to yours):
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/work/kanban/add-columns
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/work/kanban/kanban-basics
The simple way is that you can change work items’ area to the corresponding area of other team.
If you want to achieve other teams can see the related work items too, you can create a new area (e.g. SharedArea1) and assign to these teams. After that, you can change related work items’ area to that area (SharedArea1)
Team admin page (add another area):
This article may benefit you: Multiple teams