Getting Started with Boards

in this video we review azure devops boards [Music] hello everyone i'm travis and this is heraldo's in this video we review azure devops sports i'm a fan of this feature because of how easy it makes planning and allocating work items in azure devops there's a lot of flexibility and the different development methodologies boards can be applied to and best of all you can get started with azure devops boards for free at dev dev.azure.com before we get started please like subscribe to the channel comment and if you find this useful let everyone know on your favorite social media platform also check out my courses on udemy.com and follow me on twitter back to it azure devops boards is for planning organizing and monitoring work it's just one of the features built into azure devops to support the devops process be sure to check out my last video on azure devops and the devops methodology if you haven't already azure devops board supports agile scrum and kanban but is flexible enough with customizations to fit most organizations needs before we get into azure devops boards in the portal i need to point out that this video is intended to be an introduction to boards azure devops boards can be applied to many different development methodologies such as scrum and agile it's difficult to talk about boards without bringing these up but that's not what this video is intended to be about i'm trying to keep it as a generic overview of the capabilities and how to use the interface the way it's applied in real life will depend on the development practices your organization has in place if you're just getting started all of the information in the interface can be overwhelming but once you get an understanding of how it works it makes a lot more sense with that in mind let's jump into the portal and get started to get started we need to create a project if you're not signed up for azure devops you can create an account for free at dev.azure.com let's create a new project by clicking on well new project for this example i'm going to create a basic and a scrum project this is just to give a brief overview of some of the differences the project name for this example is scrum demo you can add a description and make it public or private go to advanced here we can select our version control and under work item process we have the option for agile basic cmmi and scrum select scrum for this example click create let's go back to the organization now let's create another new project this is the one we're going to actually use we'll give it a name basic demo and under advanced we'll leave it as basic great from here in our basic project let's go to boards and this is what i want to show if we go to work items we have three epic issue and task now let's go back to the organization and we'll go into scrum demo to boards and under work item tasks you can see we have several additional ones this is intended to match with the scrum development methodology the point is some features are different depending on the type of project we select let's remove the scrum demo project from within the project we'll go to the settings the little gear icon on the bottom left and in overview on the bottom we have the option to delete the project you have to type in the name of the project to delete it notice also that the project can be recovered up to 21 days after it's deleted we'll click delete for the rest of this we'll work with the basic demo the account i'm logged in as is the admin we'll also have a user account that will assign tasks to we have to have users to assign work to or i'd have to do it all myself from the main project page select invite if the user is email enabled they'll get an invitation to join the project you can also create multiple teams in a project and select what team you want to add them to let's take a look at another way to do this go to project settings that's the gear icon go to teams select the team and add from here add the upn of an account to add to the project the user account i'm adding is not email enabled we'll add the user and click save let's log in to azure devops as that user you can either use a different web browser or an in private window we'll go to dev.azure.com sign in and now the user can see the project if the user is already logged in they may need to log out and log back in to see the changes let's create a work item next we'll go back to the admin view we'll go to boards and we'll start with the best way not to do this when we open boards it puts us in work items with a create new work item option let's add a new task for this example i'm going to use some azure virtual desktop tasks the tasks themselves don't matter this is just an example i'm using let's give this item a name prep subscription for avv for this example we'll assign a user give it a description for azure virtual desktop we have to configure a v-net and active directory once finished click save if we go back to the user view we should see the new task there it is notice at the top we have some filter options we can change this to assigned just to me we can also filter by type state area and tags now let's see how it looks in boards it's not there let's go back to the other admin view here we are logged in as the admin let's go to boards it's not there either so what happened to understand this let's view the hierarchy of basic items real quick here's the azure devops documentation and if we scroll down and look at the different project types if we go to basic it shows the hierarchy of epic issue and task epic is high level it's a portfolio of product backlogs or issues don't think of an issue as a problem or a bug an issue is a unit of work an issue is a problem that our development efforts are trying to solve a feature ad or an upgrade for example tasks are steps needed to complete an issue an issue can have multiple tasks and an epic is made up of multiple issues the board only shows issues related to an epic a task alone will not show up because that should be a property of an issue the task we added previously should have been an issue the issue is that our subscription is not ready for azure virtual desktop tasks are steps to complete that issue and remember each development methodology has a different set of hierarchies we can see for the agile process scrum and cmmi let's go back to the devops portal the work item view is a way to see a list of all items and we can filter down to just items assigned to us or just with specific tags or different types it's also the default view when we open boards but it's not the best place to create and manage work items a better place for creating and managing work items is backlogs backlog is a list of items that have to be done to complete an epic this view allows us to create issues and related task work items for the project before we add any new work item let's convert the task we previously added to an issue we'll go back to work items open up the task and with the three dots on the right we'll select change type and we'll change it to an issue and click ok don't forget to click save now if we go into boards it shows we have the issue now and if we go back to the user view it shows up automatically there as well from the admin view let's go back to backlogs now it shows the issue of prep the subscription for avd but there are two tasks required to complete that issue so if we click on the plus sign we can create a task so this one will be create the v-net and we can add a description don't forget to assign our user and click save and close now we'll create another one here we have to add connectivity to active director domain services don't forget to assign a user save and close and there's one other thing i want to change let's go back into our issue and we're going to add a tag we'll add urgent if you don't see the tag in the drop down you can just type it in so let's save and close this is urgent because it's a prerequisite for any other tasks let's create the rest of the issues and the tasks we'll add another work item this one is to create a host pool let's go in and edit that we'll assign the user give it a description we'll use a bicep template to deploy the host pool that all looks good save and close we'll add a task create bicep template assign the user and obviously if you had a bigger group you could spread this workload around we'll save and close and then one more work item this one is to create the session host we'll add a task bicep templates for session house make sure we assign the user and close now we have a long list of tasks we can also drag these around for example before we do anything we have to prep the subscription for azure virtual desktop so we can drag that to the top and we have to create the host pool before we create the session hosts so that just puts it in order now that we have our issues and our tasks for this project let's go back to the board here we have all the work items in the to do column we also have doing and done the idea is we can move these work items from to do to doing and then done once finished tracking progress along the way notice next to doing there's a zero slash five that indicates work in progress or wip or whip with devops we're trying to do more work in smaller batches so it's important to keep the wip low so the developers can focus on a smaller number of tasks there's another column i like to add the hold column sometimes an issue may move to the doing column but then runs into some kind of block maybe a dependency isn't finished during that time it's not getting worked on so it's not really work in progress but it's also not really in the backlog or the to-do list let's add a hold column next go to the gear icon in the top right we're going to update a few items first go to columns and we'll add a column we'll call this one on hold notice we can set a wip limit if we scroll down we can also set a definition of done so for on hold that would be whatever's blocking it has been removed but for doing we may want to say when all tasks are complete next go to tag colors here we can assign a color to different tags let's add a color and for this one we'll select our urgent tag and set the color to red we can take this even further with styles go to styles add a style rule give it a name we'll call this on hold change the card color to yellow scroll down to the rule criteria and under field we'll select board column leave it to equals and the value is on hold let's click save and close now right away we notice that the urgent tag is now red in the board let's go back to our user view there it is let's go back to work items the user can see the different items and see that one of them's urgent so they'll open that up and let's change the state from to do to doing and let's go back to the board now for this example let's say the user tries to create the virtual network but they don't have rights so the user can open up the card and start a discussion they can add a note about the problem we'll save and close and then move this to on hold you'll notice right away that the card changed to yellow because of the style rule this helps us identify that there's a problem let's go back to work items and under work items we can see a comment let's go back to the admin view we'll go back to work items now the admin can see that there's a comment open up the issue and they can see that there's a problem with writes to create the v-net so that can be addressed we'll save that and now if we go back to the user view they can open up the card and see that they now have rights so we'll go back to board and we'll move that back to the doing column that's a pretty high level overview of the flow and some of the features there's one other thing i want to look at is creating a chart so let's go back to the admin view we'll go to queries one of the reasons i like the boards feature in devops is because in addition to creating and assigning work items we can also monitor their progress from queries we'll create a query that shows the status of our issues click on new query this is the interface for creating queries it can get fairly granular with a lot of fields and values to choose from leave field set to work item type operator is equals and for value set it to issue this will return all issues in the project we'll run the query that looks good now let's save the query we'll give it a name work item chart now go to charts at the top of the screen we'll create a new chart leave it set to pi and under group by change it to state we could modify other settings such as color click ok to create the chart now we can see the number of items that are to do and in progress if any were finished that would show up here as well that's an overview of working with azure devops boards that was an overview of creating and managing users on a project creating work items changing the board and creating queries and charts in azure devops boards if you made it this far you must have enjoyed the video please subscribe and like and thanks for watching

Channel: Travis Roberts

Views: 46,012

Keywords: Boards, Azure Boards, DevOps Boards, DevOps, Azure DevOps, Git, GitHub, Teams Foundation Server, TFS, Server, Code, Cloud, Cloud Services, Iot, IaC, Infrastructure as Code, azure devops tutorial for beginners, Scrum, Agile, Kanban

Id: 5VMY-0tVCNQ

Length: 17min 21sec (1041 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 05 2022