Azure DevOps | Customizing your Board

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hi kelly hello mike how are you how are you doing i'm excellent thanks for asking so what are we talking about today so uh we've been talking about some uh high level topics recently and i wanted to dive into just some cool stuff that we think people need to know so i figured let's talk about our favorite customizations that you can do for your boards in azure devops so i love it um i have quite a few uh things i like to do in azure devops and i guess you have some as well right especially around the boards and everything of course um before we get started quick question why do we want to customize the boards [Music] i think we've harped on this a few times in videos but you always want to do what works for your team and that means a lot of times you're not using what comes out of the box you want to figure out what works well what doesn't do more things that do work do fewer things that don't work and customization really helps you do that customizations do that one thing that is important for me um having some background in manufacturing is visual management uh being able to look at a board and see what see the state of our product uh without having to drill in and try to find information it's presented to me right up front cool nothing is better than running your daily scrum and being able to pull up the board and know what's happening at a quick glance okay so let's get started um i'll take it off if that's okay let's go okay so my uh top two favorite customizations on cards is really about the styling of the card not really a styling but maybe some styling and also the item that is displayed on a card regarding the fields um so i'll start off with these two and so i'm on right now the parts unlimited team page again you know we pulled this in off of the azure devops demo generator stuff and you can do you can do the same um so the customization is really simple there's a little gear here we'll click on the gear and i'm going to show you a couple of my favorite customizations out of the box it doesn't show the id i always like to see the id because talking about it and there's a little button here that says field i actually have like three main fields i really like to see all the time every time again this is always specified by team but i like to know the area path that's always a helpful one and i like to see the iteration that it's also in and then i'm always curious as to who created the item and the reason being is because i want to be able to go to that person to be able to ask them what it is that they may mean by something if i'm not sure without having to go look at the item itself and then i'm also going to check on if you want to display fields even when they are empty so i've added those to the product backlog item i'm going to add the same three to the bug as well as check the show id field so we set the area path the iteration path and of course created by and then i'll check if it's and then when i say save and close you see that the board changes with all that information showing up very very helpful i have a lot more uh usefulness out of it and if i do change an area path for something i'll change this guy to something different you can see that it's now in a different look you know what i just did i changed it to the wrong area path which got it out of my team space so mistake on my part but if we do add it into a different area path we would be able to see it so that's the first customization i like okay another one of my favorite things to do is to be able to color code the cards and the color coding in the cards helps to visualize certain things so in this case what i want to do is color codes based on their priority so if we look at the card we'll just grab one i see that this priority is a priority one which signifies to me it's pretty important so let's highlight this card some way that we would know here are some items that are pretty important so again we go into the gear we go into styles now look at the styling rules that i have and i don't have any so i'm going to create a new styling rule and i'll just title this one high priority and i'll choose a color for this and i'm going to make this one we'll make it an orangey color or i guess it's peach i don't know orange peach and we'll bold the title and we'll look at the field and the field we'll switch it select its priority and we'll say that if the priority equals a one now one other thing that i'm going to do to this is i'm going to add one other field that's going to be that it's in the committed state i don't care if something's a high priority and it's in the new because we can add a lot of stuff that's high priority according high priority according to the business but we want this stuff that's in the committed state so we'll say state equals committed and now anything that's in the committed state will be color-coded orange or the card of the orange so as you see in this case i have two cards that are orange and they're high priority there may be others in approved and new and cl and done but right now i don't want to do all right i think that leads us right into one of my favorite customizations i'm a heavy user of tags i think that a lot of times you have uh information that you can't necessarily capture in some of the fields that you might have and you just need to stamp a backlog item with some information so i like to use tags and then you can further customize your boards using those tags so i've got an item that is in my committed state let's say that that one is blocked this one right here provide tentative duration for shipping i have information that i need to know about this one before i can actually work on it so i'm going to add a new tag that says it's blocked and i'm going to go ahead and save that so now you'll see it shows this tag but it's pretty light blue it may not immediately stand out there may be some tags that i want to draw some more attention to so i'm going to go back into those same customizations and you're going to see this thing called tag colors and i'm going to add a tag color and pick the one that i have and pick blocked and i want it to really stand out so i'm going to make it this bright red you do have to worry a little bit about color overload so now we've got some bright orange and some bright red consider that but now you're going to see that your attention is pretty much immediately drawn to this bright red blocked tag so you can help with your at a glance views of your boards these will also work inside of your individual sprint boards so those same tag colors will apply that's really useful very cool so we have some fields that we've added we've added some color coding styles and some tag styles now we're going to customize the look of the board not the cards on the board we're going to add what's called a swim lane as well as a couple of columns so as you can see on this k in this case we have new approved committed and done however i really like to expand that a little bit more and have a development column and a qa column i'm going to leave the four that i have and then i'm going to add two new columns uh for the development team and for the qa team so again it comes back into the customizations on the gear we'll start off with the columns i'm going to go to my committed column i'll insert a column it inserted it to the left i'm just going to drag it to the right of the committed and i'll call this column development and one thing that i really like to do with development is i like to split it into doing and done so that way i can see what i have in the development the developers are working on and what they've moved over uh that they've finished that just means it's ready for qa and i'll go ahead and i'm going to add another column and this one's going to be called qa and again i'm going to split that column and once i do i'm going to leave the state in uh i'm going to change the state to committed for both of these so when it's in development the state is committed now a state and a column are two different things sometimes they map right up uh but other times the state of a work item may be different than the column name so i'll do i'm going to leave those there one thing for these columns i'm going to do is two more things for the columns is to put in the definition of done so i'm going to add the definition of done for the development team so i have some text i'm going to paste into here and you can also do markup if you want or mark down if you want to and it looks like there's a little bit of a spelling error so definition definition of done and then we'll save and close this now what we'll see here is you'll notice that i have committed and right right before committed now i have development and then right after that i have qa and i have doing and done so i'll just drag this over and now i have one item in doing when the development team finishes this work item they can submit it they can slide over to done still stays in the committed stage uh or in a committed stage but now the qa team can see what work is on on the way to be able to be tested and the same with the qa that's the columns now let's add a swim lane so let's add a swim lane that is expedite so we'll add a new swim lane we'll call it x-bag and this swim lane we're going to make sure that it's at above the default swim lane and what this is going to do is every state for approve committed development in qa not the new and done will have this new swim link so earlier we made two cards higher priority well let's expedite the uh one card and drop it into the committed um expedite swim lane and then you can see that this this work item takes higher priority or precedence over everything else maybe there's an urgent need for this that looks great i like it one cool thing as we've been going through this when you make changes to the board i can't auto refresh but when those are already changed i'm refreshing like actually seeing you drag things across the board is always fun to watch i like that it just magically moves all right so now we've got our board i think pretty much how we like it something that might work for our team some customizations can be made to your actual backlog items to improve consistency and this is one that i really like especially as it applies to something like bugs i might have a qa resource that writes amazing bug reports and i want all of my qa people to write something in a similar manner so i'm going to save one of their items as a template and then other people can apply that template and be sure to fill in the same information so i've put in one here number 309 if we just take a look at that that they've got you know some quick information expected result actual result they actually put in the browser information stuff that can rarely happen sometimes in bug reports i want to make sure that this is done consistently so if i just look at my actions over here and templates i can say capture and then i can choose which of these i actually care about i don't really care to capture the iteration or the priority but everything else maybe not even the severity but the repro steps i want to keep those so people know how to fill that in you'll notice it's html because we've got a wysiwyg editor there it's going to start with the same state i want to have that system info i don't need to capture the title but all of the information that i want here so i'm going to save this to my team my parts unlimited team and i'm going to say that this is a a bug report template so i'm going to save that close here now if i am creating a new bug something bad happened when i actually go in to edit this i can choose templates again and i can pick bug report and it will fill this in for me so that all i have to do is change the relevant information so that i can know kind of what my template looks like so that i can keep consistency across whoever is submitting a bug report really helpful there okay one thing i actually learned recently has become one of my new favorite customizations and it's not necessarily related to boards but i think it fits in with process and communication with your team and that is the information banner so you'll see some times on sites that they have announcements there's going to be an outage window or you know they want to say hey mike's birthday is coming up let's tell people about it and we want to put that so that everyone can see it now this you have to use the azure cli to do but we can show you what that looks like so i'm going to log in to my azure site with just an az login here you'll see it'll just kind of pop up off to the side and let me log in so i will let that happen once i'm not actually going to log in so i have one that i have already added in previously we're going to be changing the url of our azure devops team so we want to let people know what this is and you'll see a couple things in here so we're doing this admin banner ad we're pointing it to our adopt site we're saying what our message is we're saying that the url is changing on this date and then i've got an expiration date so i don't need to come in here and manage it that the date is changing on october 1st so i'm going to go ahead and expire this message on october 1st and then i'm giving it a type warning and you'll see what that'll look like so i'm just going to hit enter here you'll see that this will take a second and it'll go out it'll tell you that it's been successful and now if i refresh my site you'll see that i've got a nice little warning banner here saying that my url is changing on october 1st so that all your users will see that you've got some cool options there to add remove you can have some things in red or just informational banners and i find that nice to be able to communicate with my team without them needing to be on a dashboard or anything like that those are some really cool customizations all right i i think there's a lot you can do here these are our favorites the ones that we find we apply with almost every team that we work with so i think everyone should give them a shot see what they like yep so anyway remember the most important thing is work with your team it has to be something the team agrees thanks for thanks for paying attention that sucks so just remember the board customizations should be something that the team agrees to work with do what works for you thanks mike thanks kelly talk to you later don't forget to like and subscribe and if you have questions or topics that you'd like us to talk about let us know in the comments thanks for watching

Channel: The Kelly and Mike Show

Views: 11,811

Keywords: devops, azure, boards, cusomizations, Azure DevOps

Id: lKNVn4PqxAI

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 09 2021