I am using Azure DevOps boards and when I navigate to Backlogs in Azure Boards, I see a column named Order.
When I check/open the work items, they don't have a field named "order". There is no value seen for that column for us. We are not sure whats the purpose of such field/column and where we can enter the values for it.
Kindly share your information on this.
This column represents a sequence of your work. The mapped work item field depends on your team project process template: Backlog priority or stack rank order
As you drag and drop items within the backlog list, a background
process updates the Stack Rank (Agile and CMMI processes) or Backlog
Priority (Scrum process) fields
Additionally, the backlogs do not show the order if you enable parents in the view.
Helpful link: Fix display, reordering, and nesting issues
Related
I have a azure boards project with simple flow.
We only use Epics / Issues, almost never work-items for sake of simplicity.
Can I customize the Sprint Taskboard (or create new board), so that it will show Issues in the state columns instead workitems?
You can customize the Product backlog Board to do exactly what you want. In which case you could completely ignore the "Sprints":
If needed add additional columns:
To end up with something like this:
You may create a child process based on Agile: Create and manage inherited processes and assign your project to it.
After that, you may assign Issue to any backlog level... as example:
open the task backlog level:
Add issue to the task level:
Use it in the sprint:
I have created a copy of the Scrum process for my DevOps project, and created specific work item types (based on the task) for my two project teams(Design and Build). I would like to tailor their specific Sprint taskboards to display only the work item type relevant for their team, which I hope would in turn allow me to tailor the required columns to only those relevant for their work item type.
Can you please advise if this is possible ?
We can customize the backlogs in the Process of the Organization Settings, and add the required work item types to the corresponding backlog level, but this applies to all teams, I am afraid that the work item type only displayed for a separate team is currently not supported.
We can remove states from columns in Column Options:
Update:
For example: If we want to remove the test2 column shown in the figure above, we need to map the state to test2 in the other columns:
Otherwise we will receive the following prompt:
I have an Azure DevOps board in the cloud configured to use a (modified) CMMI process.
I would like to export the tree of backlog items as CSV to another system, and I want to be able to replicate the exact order of the items.
Microsoft explains that:
As you drag and drop items within the backlog list, a background
process updates the Stack Rank (Agile and CMMI processes) or Backlog
Priority (Scrum process) fields.
The Parent field helps me reconstruct the tree hierarchy.
But some of my items don't seem to have any value in the Stack Rank field, so I can't determine the correct order of sibling nodes.
In particular, it looks like items created as Epics and Features might be given a Stack Rank, but items created as Requirements or Tasks may not.
If I move items around, a Stack Rank value is assigned to the one that I moved, but not to its siblings.
How can I ensure that every item is given an appropriate Stack Rank value when it is created?
Or is there some operation I can do (preferably automatically via API) to add a Stack Rank to items that don't have one?
According to this github issue response from #msebolt, Stack Rank isn't automatically assigned unless an item is re-ordered.
It seems that for items without a Stack Rank value, I can rely on the order of the items in the CSV export.
I have a number of teams in the Azure DevOps (Visual Studio Online) tracking a different type of work item.
Currently i have created 3 different backlogs for 3 different teams.
There is 2 default backlogs 'Epics' and 'Features', hence total of 5 backlogs.
I'm trying to added a 4th team and now trying to add a backlog for that team.
But i'm getting the message "You have reached the maximum number of backlog levels".
I also learnt that maximum number of allowed Portfolio backlog levels defined for a process is 5.
I also tried to edit the default backlog, which would not let me de-select the work item selected in it, so i could rename it and add the new work item it needs to track.
So is there any other way i could achieve that or to increase the number of portfolio backlog levels.
By default projects, your hierarchy is shown as below:
If you need more than two portfolio backlogs, you can add up to two more for a total of five backlog levels. (limits mentioned here. Portfolio backlog levels defined for a process 5)
This will increase the totally level to 7 (3 customized+ Epic+Feature+PBI+Task)
You can add them by customizing your process, adding new work item types, and then configuring your backlogs and boards.
You can also add or modify the fields defined for a work item type (WIT) or add a custom WIT.
After this it could be:
For details, see Customize an inheritance process and Customize your backlogs or boards (Inheritance process).
However, this is backlog level not designed for multiple teams.
Your team's product backlog lists only those items whose area path matches those assigned to your team.
For details, see Define area paths and assign to a team.
Then you could simply switch backlog for different teams here:
I think you may be going about this the wrong way with respect to Azure DevOps.
You should look into having an Area Path for each Team. See here. For instance in my company we have two Teams say; Alpha and Omega and we've set up two Area Paths as Company\Alpha and Company\Omega. You can then manage each teams backlogs, iterations, work items etc. separately. See here also. We use the same set of iterations across all teams and when we move work items between teams we change the Area Path of the work items.
I have a VSTS project based on the Scrum process with two Area Paths for frontend and backend teams. For all Backlog item boards I created a new column to indicate what is 'ready for testing' (splitted in doing and done). For the state mapping I could only chose 'Commited' from the dropdown list.
The root area is configured to include both sub-areas and should provide a broad overview for the product owner about the progress and the tester to see what he needs to do.
My problem is, that when a team moves an item to this column, the change of state is not reflected on the general board. How can I achieve this? Or what are best practices to deal with additional states like 'ready for deployment' and 'ready for test'?
Kanban board states are "per team" so you won't see the change reflected in another team's board (in this case, the top level default team).
If this was on-premise we could add a new underlying State to the Work Item so it worked across teams. I believe this is coming for VSTS but it's not there yet.
VSTS and TFS 2015 Update 1 allow you to Query by Kanban board changes which means you could have a Work Item Query which shows all the items across teams that are Ready For Test on the board.
Depending on exactly what you want to see in your query results, you'll probably have to do something slightly clever with grouping the clauses of your query - ie. (PBI Area Path = Area 1 AND Column State = Ready for test) OR (PBI Area Path = Area 2 AND Column State = Ready for test)