Azure Boards (Azure DevOps) Hands-on Lab

hello so in this lab exercise we are going to learn agile planning and portfolio management with azure boards this is a hands-on lab experience and in this lab we will start with setting up an azure devops organization i will help you understand how you can begin with azure devops demo generator then we are going to focus on all of these tasks so within the azure devops portfolio we are going to use azure boards today using azure boards we are going to perform all of these tasks to simulate agile planning and portfolio management so i hope you find this lab useful so before we start with the devops lab the first step what we need to do is we need to set up an azure devops organization so to set up the devops organization i'm gonna go to a new tab and i'm gonna go to dev.azure.com that will take you to this page so to start your devops organization if you don't have already all you have to do is click on start free or sign in with your azure devops so i'm going to click on sign in to azure devops with my azure username and password click on that it is asking me to confirm some information like my name email address and the location i'm gonna say yes and click on continue and once you get this message of get started with azure devops click on continue again and give a name for your organization i'm gonna call it agtc devops and pick a place where you would like to host your projects in so i'm gonna pick australia east verify the details and click on continue all right so the setup for our organization is completed so now it is asking do you want to create a new project to get started so we will not use this at the moment so i'm going to help you understand for your lab exercise you can use something called azure devops demo generator that's what we're going to use now so for that i am going to go to another tab and this time i am going to go to azure devopsdemogenerator.com azurewebsite.net so what we are going to do is we are going to set up the prerequisites for this lab which consists of the pre-configured parts unlimited teams project based on azure devops demo generator template so the template we are going to find is parts unlimited so this azure devops demo generated website will automate the process of creating a new azure devops projects within your account that is pre-populated with content which include work items reports etc that is what we need for this lab so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna click on sign in because i've already signed in with my username and password on the same browser so i'm gonna click on sign in it should automatically pick up the user credentials as you can see that the environment automatically picked up my environment and click on accept so on the create new project page first let's give a name for our project i'm gonna call it as agile planning and portfolio management with azure boards and under select organization select your organization which is what we created in the first step the next step instead of using the smart hotel 360 template click on choose template and we are going to find parts unlimited you can see that parts unlimited template is here and you can use this lab to provision a scrum based team project containing sample work items complete source code and pipeline definition to deploy parts unlimited and this is a sample e-commerce website based on the phoenix project so click on that and on the right hand side after selecting parts unlimited click on select template all right so our template is selected we given a name for our project and we selected the organization the next step is to click on create project so we need to wait for this process to complete so this would ideally take around two to three minutes and when you try to do it if this process fails you need to navigate to your azure devops organization delete the project and you need to try one more time all right so congratulations our project for this lab is successfully provisioned and let's go and do our next task now that we have completed the prerequisites for the lab the first task we are going to do is manage themes areas and iteration within the manage agile project exercise let's go and do that so in this exercise we are going to use azure boats to perform a number of common agile planning and portfolio management tasks which include management of teams areas iterations work items sprints and capacity and we are going to learn how to customize kanban boards defining dashboards and customizing teams processes and the first task is to create a new team and configure its areas and iterations so the first step is to click on this icon which is called cogwheel and once you click that you will be able to open the project settings page on the left hand side under general click on teams as you can see that there are already a few teams in this project but what we are going to do is we are going to create a new team for this lab exercise to create a new team click on new theme so each new project is configured with a default team and we have an option to create additional teams and each team can be granted access to a suite of agile tools and team assets the ability to create multiple teams give you the flexibility to choose the proper balance between autonomy and collaboration across the enterprise under the create new team panel give a name for your team so i'm gonna call it as pool dash web i'm not gonna modify any other changes like adding a member or setting up permissions etc what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna hit on click create so now on the list of themes you can see that there is a newly created team which we created just now which is pull dash web click on that so by default the new team has only me as its member because i'm the one who created it so that i can use this view to manage such functionality as team memberships notifications and dashboards so you can see the relevant links for notification and dashboards here so what we're gonna do right now is we're going to define the schedule and scope of the team so to do that click on iterations and area paths so that opened up in another window for me so we are still under boards under teams configuration at the top of the page this time click on iterations and on the bottom of the page you can see that there is an add icon to select iterations here we are going to select our iteration which is agile planning and portfolio management with azure boards and this time we're going to select sprint 1 and click on save and close so our sprint 1 iteration has been added so please note that this is our first print and and if you notice the date the sprint has already been passed this is because the demo data generator is designed to build out project history so that this print occurs in the past so we are going to repeat the same process one more time to create sprint two and sprint three so let's click on select iterations this time i'm going to select sprint 2 and one more time this time we're going to select sprint 3. as you can see that in the bottom of my screen you will be able to see all three sprints so now let's go back to the top of the boards this time select areas under area you will be able to see that there is an automatically generated area with the name matching the name of the team which is pull dash web so if you don't hover your mouse you won't be able to see this next step so i want you to pay attention here so if you hover your mouse over here you would be able to see an ellipsis so click on that ellipsis and select include sub areas on the drop down list you would be able to see include sub areas now you can see that the sub areas are included please note that the default settings for all teams is to exclude sub-area paths so we have changed it to include the sub-area so that the team gets visibility into all of the work items from all teams optionally the management team could also choose it to not include sub-areas which automatically removes work items from their view as soon as they are assigned to one of the teams alright so our first task is completed in this task we will learn how to step through common work item management task so the work items play a prominent role in azure devops whether describing work to be done impediments to release test definition or other key items work items are the workhorse of modern projects so we will focus on using various work items to set up the plan to extend the parts unlimited site with a product training section while it can be daunting to build out such a substantial part of a company's offering azure devops and the scrum process makes it very manageable so to do that i'm gonna go back to my azure boards so click on azure boards and select work items so this task is designed to show you a variety of ways you can create different kinds of work items as well as to demonstrate the breadth and the features available on this platform as a result these steps should not be viewed as perspective guidance for project management and the features are intended to be flexible enough to fit your process needs so when you do it please go ahead and explore and experiment as you go so after going into work items on the top ribbon box click on new work item and on the drop down list select epic the work item what we are going to create is product training and right below the product training you can see there is unassigned so select the unassigned and assign it to a user so i'm gonna assign it to myself next go under the area and select this drop down box you would be able to see our project and we have to select our team so our team is pull web so i'm going to select pull web after that go to iteration and select the drop down list and i'm going to sell sprint 2 this will set the iteration to agile planning portfolio management with azure boards sprint 2. after making these changes hit save so on a real-life project you would want to fill out as much information as possible but because this is a lab environment i'm not doing that and you need to understand that the work item form will include all the relevant work item settings this include details about who it is assigned to the status across many parameters and all the associated information and history for how it has been handled since the creation one of the key areas to focus is related work so right now go ahead and click on add a link and within that you have two options existing item and new item so select new item on the add link panel make sure you leave the default as child and come to work item type and select this drop down box instead of task we're gonna select feature and we're gonna give a name for this i'm gonna call it training dashboard if you want to give a comment you can do that i'm gonna click on ok make sure you scroll down and you can see the related work here so we added product training here and on top of the page click on save and close now on the left hand vertical navigation plane click on boards again under boards click on boards close the default view and under my team boards click on pull web boards this is what we created on the boards panel make sure you see this backlog items and click on this drop down box and instead of backlog items switch it to features so this is going to make it easy to add tasks and other work items to the features as you can see that there is already one feature added this is what we created in the previous task so if you hover your mouse pointer over to the task so you can see this ellipsis so click on this ellipsis so i'm gonna make a mark so you know where to do it so click on this and from the drop down list we are gonna add product backlog item so click on that this gets us a text box of the new product backlog item so you can type in i'm going to type in as as a customer i want to view new tutorials and as soon as you release your mouse pointer or hit enter that entry is already added so what we have done right now is we have created a new product backlog item which is known as pbi and this is a child of the future and shares its areas and iteration so i'm not i'm going to uncheck it so it's not completed yet so we are going to repeat the same step to add two more pbis which is product backlog item so you know how to add it so go to this ellipsis click on add product backlog item this time i'm gonna call it as as a customer i want to see the tutorials i recently viewed hit enter and add one more pbi so click on add product backlog item i'm gonna call this as i want to request new tutorials and hit enter so now if you go back to this navigation pane and instead of features we select backlog items you can see that the backlog items have a state that defines where they are relatively been is it completed or is it approved committed or done so we can always click and open and edit the work item using the form or it is easier to just drag and drop these cards into the board so i can just simply click on the board and i can simply drag to a different state based on the state of this actions other option is if you hover your mouse over these items you can see there is an expand option click on this expand option and this is where you can change the state to either approved committed done or removed or you can either click on this unassigned box and assign it to a user as well okay so what we're gonna do right now is we're gonna assign different stages to these tags or pbis so for the item number 161 i'm gonna click on state and click on uproot so it moves to the approved state and since it is not assigned to anybody i'm gonna click on this expand icon one more time click on this unassigned box and i'm gonna assign it to myself and i'm gonna move the pbi 162 as a customer i want to see tutorials i receive recently viewed i am going to move it to committed and the third work item i want to review this new tutorials i'm going to move it to done so this task board is one view into the backlog and you can use the tabular view as well if you want so to view as a tabular view all you have to do is click on this view as backlog this will switch it to the tabular view to switch back you can click on view as board within the tabular view you can use this plus and minus symbols to view the nested task under these work items and the second plus symbol this will give you an option to add a new task to it so let's go and click on this plus icon to add a new task so i'm going to select this to add a new task this will open a new task panel so the first step is to enter a title on the text box so i'm gonna call it add page for most recent tutorials if you want to add more description in the real world you will add more this description so other people know about it and on the details tab this is where you would be able to change the priority and change the status of the activity or status of your remaining work so the remaining work i'm gonna add five under activity select i'm gonna select not deployment or design i'm gonna select development so this task is under development and we have five tasks remaining and the priority is to after making the changes click on save and close now you can see that there is a new task added so let's go and add one more task so click on this plus icon and give a name i'm gonna call it as optimized data query for the most recent tutorials and under details priority i'm gonna retain it as two remaining work i'm gonna add three and under activity this is on the design stage after making all these changes click on save and close this is how you can add more items or task under each of this list so this is how you can manage your work item so that's the end of this task so the next test what we are going to do is to manage sprints and capacity so let's go and do that on the left hand vertical navigation pane click on sprints so the teams build the sprint backlog during the sprint planning meeting typically held on the first day of the sprint and each sprint corresponds to a time-boxed interval which supports the team's ability to work using agile processes and tools during the planning meeting the product owner works with the team to identify those stories or backlog items to complete in the sprint so these planning meetings typically consist of two parts in the first part the team and the product owner identify the backlog items that the team feels it can commit to completing in the sprint these are all based on the experience with the previous prints these items gets added to the sprint backlog and the second part is the team determines how it will develop and test each item they then define the estimate the task required to complete each item and finally the team commits to implementing some or all the item based on these estimates so the sprint backlog should contain all the information the team needs to successfully plan and complete work within the time alerted without having to rush at the end so before planning the sprint you would want to have created prioritized and estimated the backlog and defined the sprint and sprint is again part of your boards so on the dashboard tab of your sprint view in the toolbar on the right hand side select the view options this is directly to the left of the funnel icon so in the view options drop down list select the work details entry please note that the one which we created the current sprint has pretty limited scope there are two tasks in the to-do stage at this point neither task has been assigned so both show a numeric value to the right of the unassigned entry this estimates the remaining work estimate so first i'm gonna select the first task and click on unassigned and assign the task to myself so by doing that this will automatically updates this work to the assigned section of the work details pane now let's go and click on the capacity tab and this view enable you to define what activities a user can take on and at what level of capacity so let's click on this unassigned one and select the activity development and give the capacity for this as one so this is capacity per day text box this represents one hour of development work per day please note that you can add additional activities per user in the case they do more than just development so let's assume you're gonna take some vacation you can click on this zero day entry and this will display a panel where you can set your days off so let's assume i'm gonna take five days of work holidays during this next sprint i'm gonna select 23rd till 27 and after making those changes click ok and now i have marked this particular user is going to have a future holiday tag and i have make sure that there is capacity planned for one day so work for development and click on save now let's go and click on taskboard and this time click on view options and click on work details here you can see the work details panel has been updated to reflect your available bandwidth so the actual number displayed in the work details panel might vary but your total sprint capacity will be equal to the number of working days remaining till the end of the sprint since you have allocated one heart per day take a note of this value since you will be using it in upcoming steps one other convenient feature of the board is that you can easily update key data inline so it's a good practice to regularly update the remaining work estimate to reflect the amount of time expected for each task so let's say you have reviewed the work for add page for most recent tutorials and found that it will actually take longer than originally expected let's go and change the remaining work to 15 hours and click on save and close switch the view to work details as you can see that this automatically expands the development and your personal capacities to their maximum so one way to resolve this capacity issue would be to move the task to the future iteration there are few ways this could be done one way is to open the task and providing access to the task details another approach would be to use the backlog view now on the taskbar tab this time click on these options and select people please note that this adjusts your views such that you can review the progress of task by person instead by a backlog item there is also a lot of other customization options available now let's go and click on this settings panel so this is called as configure team settings select styles tab and and click on styling rule under the rule name give a name called development scroll down under the card color i'm gonna select green so this will color all cards green if they meet the rule criteria which is set directly below so you can see the rule criteria here so let's go and set the rule criteria so under the field i'm gonna select activity under the operator drop down list select equal and under the value i'm gonna select development so this rule is going to set all cards assigned to development activities green and here under general this is where you can see backlogs so entities on this tab allow you to set the labels available for navigation so epics are not included by default but if you want to add epics you can select that next click on work days or working days so entities on this tab allow you to specify the working days the team follows this applies to capacity and burn down calculation and the last tab is working with bugs so entities on this tab allows you to specify how bugs are presented on the board so if you do want to make any changes here you can do that i'm gonna click on save and close so now you can see that the task associated with development is now green and it's very easy to identify all right so that completed the task on managing sprints and capacity in this task we will learn how to process or customize kanban boards so to maximize a team's ability to consistently deliver high quality software kanban emphasized two main practices the first is visualizing the flow of work this requires you to map your team's workflow stages and configure a kanban board to match the second is constraining the amount of work in progress which requires that you set working progress limits you are then ready to track progress on your kanban board and monitor key metrics to reduce lead or cycle time so let's go and do that on the left hand navigation plane click on boards under boards click on boards again so your kanban board turns your backlog into an interactive signboard providing a visual flow of work as work progresses from idea to completion you update the items on the board each column represents a work stage and each card represents a user story user stories are usually coded by blue color and box are coded in red cards or red color however every team develops its own processes over time so the ability to customize the kanban board to match the way your theme works is critical for the successful delivery so let's learn how to customize your kanban board so first on the right hand side you can see the settings icon this is to this is where you can configure team settings so click on that so on the settings panel click on tag colors and click on tag color and we are going to retain yellow color to data so i'm going to name it as data so whenever a backlog item or bug is tagged with data that tag will be highlighted as yellow now let's click on annotations and this is where you can specify which annotations you would like to include on the cards to make them easier to read and navigate when an annotation is enabled the child work items of that type are easily accessible by clicking the visualization on each card the next item is test the test tab enable you to configure how tests appear and behave on the cards so we are not making any changes i'm gonna hit on save and close so let's open the first backlog item this backlog item is as a customer i want to view new tutorials so click that so on the top next to the comment section you can see there is an option to add tag so click on add tag and i'm gonna enter tag as data if you want to add more tab you can do that i'm gonna click on add again this time i'm going to call it as ux and you can hit on save and close now you can see that there are two tags now visible on this card and the data tag is highlighted in yellow as per the configuration what we made in the last step so now let's go back to the configure team settings one more time you can find that box here under board this time select columns click on add a column first give a name for your column so i'm gonna call it qa approved under working progress limit i'm gonna type one so this work in progress item one means that one work item should be in this stage at a time you should ordinarily set this to higher values so in the real world you should ideally set this value on a higher limit now you can click on this qa approved and and you can drag this and drop it between committed and done so here you can see committed and done and i'm gonna click on save and close as you can see that there is a new stage in the workflow now which is the qa approved which we created just now so now i'm going to move this as a customer i want to see the tutorials i recently viewed to the qa approved stage now i'm going to change as a customer i want to request new tutorials to the qa approved stage please note that the stage now exceeds its work in progress limit and it is colored as red as a warning so now if you move one item to another stage so let's suppose if i move to committed you can see that the queue approved change back to green color now let's go back to the settings page go under columns click on columns and click on qa approved scroll down here you can check this box to split the column into doing and done so to create two separate columns so as your team updates the status of work as in progress from one stage to the to the next it helps that they agree on what's done means and by specifying the definition of done criteria for each kanban column you help share the essential tasks to complete before moving an item into a downstream stage so you can scroll down to the bottom of the page under definition i'm gonna add passes all the tests and click on save and close now you can see that in the qa approved stage there are two sub stages or it is a split stage now one it is doing and another one is done you can see click on this information button that will show you the definition what we have created just now now let's go back to the settings menu one more time so a kanban board supports your ability to visualize the flow of the work as it moves from new to done so click on swim lanes when you add swim lanes you can also visualize that status of the work that supports different service level classes you can create a swim line to represent any other dimension that support your tracking needs so click on add swim lane give a name i'm gonna call it expedite and click on save and close now you can move this uh work item from committed item to a doing stage at the expedite streamline so that it gets recognized as having high priority when qa bandwidth becomes available so that's a quick lesson on customizing your kanban boards you can even customize a lot of things over here in the real world scenario so in this task we will create a custom scrum based processes the processes will include a backlog item field designed to track to a proprietary parts unlimited ticket id so let's go and do that on the azure devops page click on the azure devops icon on the home page so this will take us to the home page and this is known as the root or account root page and at the bottom of the page on the left hand corner click on organization settings under organization settings scroll down under boards select processes so this is the all processors pane so you can see there is agile scrum cmmi so on the scrum one if you just hover your mouse over it you can see this ellipses so click on that and select create inherited processes in the create inherited processes from scum panel in the process give a name for this scum process i'm going to call it as customized scrum and click on create process you can see that the new process has been created and it is visible and select that so this is where you can see all the processes we are going to select the product backlog item so click on that here on the top ribbon click on new field we are going to add a field to the product backlog item and we're gonna call it as pull ticket id and on the left hand side click on layout and here click on create a new group and i'm gonna name it as parts unlimited and click on add field so now that the customized process has been configured let's switch to the agile planning and portfolio management click on processes one more time and you can see that our current project uses the scrum methodology so select scrum click on projects so here you can find the list of projects so this is where you can see the agile planning and portfolio management with azure boards entry so click on the ellipsis symbol and you can click on change processes on the change processes pane select a target process you can select customized scrum and click on save and then close now let's click on the azure devops home page and go to the root page and select the agile planning portfolio management and on the left hand side click on boards and click on work items so here i'm going to select the first work item so i want to request new tutorials so let's go and verify that we can see the ticket id field under parts unlimited group so let's scroll down you can see that now we have the ticket id field under the parts unlimited group this was defined during the process customization so you can treat this like any other text field so once the work item is saved azure devops will also save the new custom information so that it will be available for queries and through the rest of the devops so that completed the exercise on customizing the team process now let's go and do the next task all right so the last task on this azure boards lab exercise is defining dashboards so in this task we will go through steps and the processes of creating dashboards and their core components so let's go and do that so in the vertical navigation pane of the azure devops portal this time instead of boards click on overview under overview you have summary dashboards and wiki so select dashboards so dashboards allows teams to visualize status and monitor progress across the project at a glance you can make informed decisions without having to drill down into other parts of your team's project site the overview page provides access to a default team dashboard which you can customize by adding removing or rearranging the tiles each of the tile corresponds to a widget that provides access to one or more features or functions so you can access this by going under dashboards and click on overview so on the top of the dashboard page if you select this drop down option you can create a new dashboard if you want so click on create a dashboard on the right hand side give a name for your dashboard if you want you can add a description i'm gonna retain this as a team dashboard not a project dashboard under team i'm gonna select pull web that's what we created in the beginning of this lap and click on create so our new dashboard is quite empty to add a new widget all you have to do is click on add a widget and on the right hand side you can search for different boxes so i'm gonna search for sprint and search for sprint overview and select that and click on add and if you want to add more widgets you can search for it and you can add however number of widgets you want to add once you done with these edition you can click on done editing you can go directly to your newly created dashboard to add one more widget or more widgets you can click on edit and again type in sprint this time i'm searching for sprint capacity and click on add and click on done editing so you can customize it and move it wherever you want after clicking on edit so i'm going to move it here and click on done editing you can now preview these two important aspect of the current sprint on your custom dashboard so another way of customizing dashboard is to generate charts based on work item queries which you can share to a dashboard so let's go and do the work item queries so to do that go back to azure boards and this time click on queries we don't have any queries yet so click on new query so on the query under field work item type operator equal to i'm gonna select the value as task and on the editor tab under queries under field i'm gonna select area path under the value as my project which is agile planning and portfolio management with azure bots pull web select that after making the appropriate selection click on save query you can give a name for your query i'm gonna call it as web task under folder i'm gonna select shared queries oops let's click on save query one more time give a name web task and i'm gonna select saved queries and click ok now let's go and click on charts click on new chart i'm gonna call it as web task by assignment in the group by select assign to and click ok so this is the task which is assigned to my username now you can add this task to your or now you can add this chart to your dashboard so all you have to do is click on this ellipsis click on add to dashboard and select the dashboard so i'm gonna select product training and click ok now let's go back to overview click on dashboards you can see that there is a new dashboard added but this time instead of selecting from the widget we created our own custom dashboard using a query so in this lab we have learned how to use azure boards to perform a number of common agile planning and portfolio management tasks which include management of teams areas iteration work items sprints and capacity and customizing kanban boards defining dashboards and customizing team processes i hope you found the information provided in this lab helpful i will see you in the next one until then take care

Channel: Susanth Sutheesh

Views: 47,200

Keywords: azure devops, azure boards, azure devops labs, azure devops training, azure devops demo, azure boards demo, azure for beginners tutorials, handson labs

Id: lJBNTI_KVwc

Length: 41min 19sec (2479 seconds)

Published: Tue May 17 2022