Azure DevOps Boards - Use the Product Backlog to manage project requirements, tasks and bugs

hi team so today we are diving into product backlog management and how a tool like Azure devops boards can bring Clarity to a project when creating and managing a product backlog so I've been using Azure devot boards for years on most of my dynamic 2x5 or po platform projects and I hope that by the end of this video you will be as excited as I am about creating and managing a product backlog using Azure devops boards so what is the product backlog so if you're involved on an implementation of an IT project like dynamic 2x5 or the Power Platform you will need a way to manage your user requirements maybe you are involved in those initial phases of initial requirements Gathering you know with your stakeholders or you get a list of requirements in an Excel sheet or whatever format you will still need to store those requirements somewhere and manage them as the project goes so the product backlog is effectively an ordered list of items that must be done to complete your project so in the context of implementing a solution like Dynamic 65 or the PO platform the product backload serves as a living document where all the requirements enhancements bugs and Technical tasks are captured and prioritized based effectively on business value and complexity now you might think that managing a product backlog in Azure develops it's time consuming and it's way more complex than managing a product backlog for example in an Excel spreadsheet so while Excel might be a familiar and straightforward tool effectively to manage requirements and a product backlog it lacks specialized feature that Azure devops boards brings to the table so features like realtime collaboration where every member can visualize all the items on the board interact leave comments on items and so forth we can also have different work item types like for example categorize by size we can have epics feature user stories you can have bugs and each of these can have specific fields and information you want to capture for and Azure devops words also comes with pre-built reporting and analytics that give you clarity as you know you work um it provide you Clarity on your work on your teams work on your Sprint work and so forth now I been on Project where requirements were also captured in Excel sheets and it works for smaller projects right but as that list of requirements grows as the list of stakeholders grows you will need more uh collaboration features right it becomes challenging to all work from that same Excel sheets add comments add task on that sheet and so forth right so let me show you how to manage your requirements using a product backlog in Azure develop Sports okay so when you set up your project in Azure develops boards you will come with um this feature called uh backlogs and effectively you have to build your product backlog right so I'm showing you here an existing product backlog with effectively um the items here which are which are epics right but you can quickly drill down to the details of each of the Hardys of those items so you have epics then you have your features then you have a user story then you have your tasks this is how I manage most of my projects sometimes I don't use those four levels sometimes I don't use epics if just if it's a smaller project right so you can kind of configure effectively what do you want to see on the board if you don't use epic you can easily just turn epic off from that board and it will not even show um this is also related to the process you use so when you can create a new project in Azure devops board you will be asked to um choose use a preconfigured process to to manage your your project so you can see more information here as well on all the processes that are available so I use mostly the agile process but then I I tweak it and make it work for my project um so I add additional sometimes item types I configure some of the cards I configure some of those states that are that should be different per different item type so I kind of tweak it and make it my own next kind of um also of course is that you have your columns right so you can see your order but you can s see the work item type the title the state so each of uh those different item types can have different states so for example user story can have a different workflow going from new to Dev test um you know uat deployment to a feature for example right maybe feature has way less State and so forth so you can Define different State per work item types you can um of course assign items Define some tasks you can very quickly see here that some of those user stories are for example blocked and so forth you can of course show an iteration a priority and you can add additional columns right so um I can add any of the existing columns that are available and there's quite a few of these that are effectively available so you can just add some of those columns to um the change by for example I can add here and then you can see who has changed that item so another option is that you can also add progress column so there are existing ones or you can create a custom one but if I were to create just take an existing one so for example progress by user story and I add that to the list that would effectively show me the progress of completed user stories per epic so 5% of user story have been completed I can Dr it down now to the feature and I will see 20% and if I even drill down I can see it's because I have one Clos user story here um that is being visible I can also kind of filter this one out even from a setting perspective actually it's here completed child item I can switch that off and I'll remove that completed user story from the list or I can use uh filtering right so each of those you know um I can of course use a filtering which is here on top I can you know fil filter by type filter by assigned to if I wanted to see what is assigned to me filter by state by iteration what is in Sprint one right so all filter by tags what is blocked you can kind of quickly filter your product backlog you can of course as well um create directly a product uh item from here so if I were to go to an epic if I click on the little plus that will add a feature or if I go here under Le under the feature I can create a plus and then I can create the user story and then I can effectively test user story filling the details filling the description or not or I just create the user story quickly with some a quick description then I can kind of go back to that user story to discuss with my product owner later but if I create that user story you will see it now here it's also important to know that if you start a new project and you don't see uh epics for example in the list right so don't forget to go to to this configuration and turn epex on as well um you know epex feature and user story is kind of link to the agile process if you picked another process um those those um might call be differently right so scrum uses epic features and then product backlog item so it's kind of related to your agile um process that you sorry to the process that you'll be using when when configuring your project the nice things to have as well is that you can also from here very quickly drag and drop items so if I this one I wanted to move it to another feature I could just copy and drag it to that one also copy and drag for example the the order of that story right so kind of easy you know to kind of um just quickly drag and drop based on priority and of course an important step is that you can of course see the details of each of those items black it by clicking on them right so if I click on you know one of the users story I can see capture and manage lead with kind of the titles I can see the description I can see the acceptance criteria I can see any field so there are fields that are coming preconfigured when you start a new project but you can add additional fields that are not visible here or exist or you can config completely new Fields if you want to capture some additional information so for example in this case I'm adding often a design section where I capture some design ideas as I discussed that user story with a product to owner you can also capture discussions right so all the discussions that happen on that user story can be captured here you can tag people so and tag me so there is a conversation going on between and the product owner and the the lead developer here about that user story um you know and is asking the lead developer some questions about that user story and so forth so you can kind of capture specific comments about to user story within an item um you can also kind of see here related work so all you can relate you can see that parent feature but also child there is a Tas but you can also relate additional user stories here um and another nice feature as well that I found quite useful is the history you can quickly see here the history of the user Story the state it went through and also um you know who make which changes on which field right so you can quickly see here B playing P1 um acceptance criteria got defined when who made every single changes to that user story is effectively captured here voila I hope that you like this video and if that's the case please give me a thumbs up and don't hit to subscribe to the channel because I'll be doing more videos about Azure devop boards in the next few months bye

Channel: Dani Kahil

Views: 6,525

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Id: hX9jabZBxm0

Length: 10min 24sec (624 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 03 2023