Azure DevOps Server 2019 Cookbook - Second Edition

To create a team project, you need to be a member of the Project Collection Administrators group. If you aren't already part of this group, gain membership by following the steps provided here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/security/set-project-collection-level-permissions. Alternatively, follow the steps provided at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/security/set-project-collection-level-permissions to be added to one.

To create  a new team project from the web, follow these steps:

The following items are created for you as part of the team project creation process:

These are shown in the following screenshot:

Azure DevOps Server makes the process of setting up a new team project very straightforward—so much so that you may be inclined to create a new team project for every software project. I would generally not recommend this; with support for multiple teams and backlog isolation at the team level, it is possible to have a logical separation, along with the ability to share within a team project. In principle, you should consider a team project for each product, and a team for each work stream. The only time you should consider splitting a product team out into a separate team project is if it needs to follow a unique process, since process templates are scoped at the team project rather than at the team level. 

If you find yourself organically needing to grow out into a new team project to use a different process template, you can consider leveraging theVSTS Migration Toolkit (https://nkdagility.com/vsts-sync-migration-tools/) to carry out a full fidelity migration. 

If you don't have Office Excel, install it. For Azure DevOps Server 2019, you'll need Office 2013 or a later version. The Excel plugin for Azure DevOps Server is installed by installing one of the latest editions of Visual Studio or the Azure DevOps Server Standalone Office Integration installer. Azure DevOps Server Standalone Office Integration supports connecting to Azure DevOps Server from Excel, Microsoft Project, and the PowerPoint-based storyboard tool.

If you don't intend to install Visual Studio but need Office integration, download and install Azure DevOps Server Standalone Office Integration (free) from https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/. Once the installation is complete, the Excel Plugin will show up under the Team ribbon in Excel, as shown in the following screenshot:

If you don't see the Team ribbon, perform the following steps to enable it:

Now that we have the Azure DevOps Sever excel plugin installed, in this section we'll learn how to use it. 

Start by performing the following steps:

To validate whether the changes have been synchronized to Azure DevOps Server, launch the web portal in a browser, and navigate to the work hub in the PartsUnlimited team project. The newly added work item should show up under the features backlog, as shown in the following screenshot:

Follow these tips to keep your work in sync:

The Azure DevOps Server Excel plugin uses the Azure DevOps Server REST APIs, which are wrapped into an SDK. This allows for safe and secure bulk editing of work items. The plugin supports two-way updates, and changes that are made to work items in Azure DevOps Server web portal can be refreshed back into Excel by clicking the Refresh button. Refreshing the data does not overwrite any calculations or formatting that you may have applied to the worksheet. If you spend a lot of time using Microsoft Project, you'll be excited to know that the Azure DevOps Server plugin can also be used from Microsoft Project.

The marketplace features the Azure DevOps Open in Excel extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=blueprint.vsts-open-work-items-in-excel). This is a free extension that was created by Microsoft DevLabs, and adds the option of opening work items in Excel from various access points, such as work item queries, backlogs, and selective work items:

Another noticeable extension in the marketplace is the Requirements Integrator (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jgarverick.RequirementsIntegrator). This is an open source extension that was created by Microsoft MVP Josh Garverick, which introduces the capability of mapping external requirements into Azure DevOps Server to create a traceability matrix with work items. This extension introduces a new sub-tab called Requirements in the work hub, which allows you to import external requirements into TFS using a predefined Excel template:

The extension allows you to do the following:

I encourage you to look at the marketplace (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/) as it has a range of extensions that enhance the experience of planning, tracking, and managing work items. While this extension isn't necessarily a replacement for the Excel add-in, you'll find that it enhances the work planning, tracking, and management experience.

Before we dig into work item discussions, let's see how easy it is to populate your team project with sample data. The sample data widget, which can be found at https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-devlabs.SampleDataWidget, is a free extension that was developed by Microsoft DevLabs, and it makes it really easy to generate demo work items in bulk. This extension also provides an option to generate and set up work item data inline with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), giving you a great jump-start into implementing SAFe with TFS.

Once you've installed the extension, navigate to the dashboard in the PartsUnlimited project web portal. Add the sample data widget to the dashboard, select Getting started in the dropdown, and click Create. Once this awesome extension has completed its magic, you'll see your team project become populated with new features, user stories, and active iterations—all ready for you to start playing with everything they offer.

Let's perform the following steps:

 It is super easy for you to access artifacts that are most important for you. The redesigned account page has a personalized experience that shows the Projects, Favorites, Work, and PullRequests you care about. You can go to one place and quickly find everything you need to do and care about. 

Start your day with the My work items page to be able to easily access all the work items that have been assigned to you across all projects. It also lets you check and access the status of all the work items that you are following, those you have been mentioned in, or those that you have recently viewed:

Work item search allows you to search across all projects. You can scope the search and drill down into an area path of choice. You can easily search across all work item fields, including custom fields, which enables more natural searches. The snippet view indicates where matches were found. Quick inline search filters let you refine work items in seconds. The dropdown list of suggestions helps you complete your search faster. For example, a search such as AssignedTo: Tarun WorkItemType: Bug State: Active finds all active bugs assigned to a user named Tarun. 

One of the design principles of the work item search team has been to keep the search actionable. The work item search interface integrates with familiar controls in the Work hub, giving you the ability to view, edit, comment, share, and much more, right from the search results. 

Notifications help you and your teams stay informed about activity in your team projects. TFS 2018 introduced a new experience that makes it easier to manage what notifications you and your teams receive. Users have their own account-level experience for managing notification settings (available via the Profile menu).

This view lets you manage personal subscriptions and also view subscriptions that have been created by team administrators for all the projects in your account:

You can set up new notifications by clicking on the New subscription link. This new notification experience gives you access to WIQL so that you can create filter criteria for specific conditions. In addition to this, you can set up notifications to be delivered to other email addresses and soap endpoints:

You, as an individual, also have the option of unsubscribing and opting out of a team or OOB notification subscription. Whether you are an administrator or not, toggling a shared team subscription from your notification settings only impacts you and not other team members.

The TFS marketplace features the Activity Feed extension, available at https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=davesmits.VSTSActivityFeed. This free extension, created by Dave Smits, brings in the capability of viewing what's happening in your team project at a glance in one place. The extension is available as a dashboard widget, as well as a subpage in the work hub. Activity Feed gives a summary of all recent changes in work items, commits, pull requests, and builds. It tells who changed a task, who logged a bug, and who committed code. The extension supports configuration, so you can decide to filter out what's not relevant or simply configure which backlogs the work updates should be published from:

The team rooms functionality has been completely removed in TFS 2018 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2017/01/04/deprecation-of-the-team-rooms-in-team-services-and-tfs/. However, the introduction of social experiences built around you, including the search, follow, and comment features in work items and the activity feed extension, provides a far more engaging solution. 

TFS 2018 allows you to add one-level child links to work items with ease. However, when you are in a planning discussion, you sometimes want to rapidly create sub items at different levels of work item hierarchies. The TFS marketplace features the decompose extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=cschleiden.decompose), a free extension that was created by Christopher Schleiden, which allows you to quickly break down work items into sub-hierarchies. Appropriately named, this extension makes decomposing work items into sub-items very easy, and very useful during team discussion and planning sessions. Once you've installed this extension, you'll see the Decompose work item option in the work item context menu and the backlog and boards work item context menu: 

Let's perform the following steps:

The newly created work items are linked to each other. You can see this linking by expanding the linked work items in the Epics backlog:

With the growth in work item usage, there will be growth in the work item dependency tree. I usually find a list of dependencies meaningful until the depth of 3, after which I hope I could just visualize the dependency through a graph. Luckily, the TFS marketplace features the Work Item Visualization extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-devlabs.WorkItemVisualization), which is a free extension that was developed by Microsoft DevLabs. It allows you to visualize work item dependencies from within the work item form. The unique selling point of this extension is that it allows you to see how work items relate to each other, as well as code, tests, test results, builds, and external artifacts. You can even drill into your commits to explore the changeset details. Among other things, the extension also allows you to annotate and export visualizations, an example of which is provided by the following screenshot:

Story mapping is a popular way of visualizing the product backlog with Agile teams. Story mapping is a top-down approach of requirement gathering. Story mapping starts from an overarching vision. A vision is achieved via goals. Goals are reached by completing activities. To complete an activity, users needs to perform tasks. And these tasks can be transformed into user stories for software development. Story maps are traditionally created using sticky notes on walls or whiteboards, and have proven to be popular among Agile development teams. However, these traditional storyboards are not without their disadvantages: walls are not transportable and the physical nature of these maps means they are only temporary.

The TFS marketplace features the SpecMap extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=techtalk.specmap), which was created by TechTalk software, and gives you the ability to create digital storyboards. This extension allows you to use existing work items in the system, which means that SpecMap goes further than just depicting story maps: creating a story map in SpecMap helps you plan iterations in TFS and structure your backlog items in the process. The following screenshot depicts a story map of the PartsUnlimited iOS feature team, who are identifying the user journey for the new iOS application that they are creating for both free and paid users:

Kanban literally translates as signboard or billboard. Accordingly, your number-one task is to visualize your team's workflow. You do this by identifying the types of work and handoffs that occur regularly as your team moves items off the backlog and into a shippable state. The main workflow stages performed by our PartsUnlimited team are captured here as Analyze, Develop, Test, Deploy, and Feedback. Each column corresponds to a work stage the team performs on each item before it can be considered done: 

The work item does not have all of these states, but the beauty of the Kanban board is that it allows you to map multiple workflow stages to a work item state. So, in our example, the develop, test, and deploy stages can be mapped to the work item state active. This can be done right from within the Configure team settings dialog in the board view, without having to modify the process template. Columns allow you to visualize the workflow that's used to deliver requirements to production. Swim lanes, on the other hand, help visualize the different streams of work. Let's see how we can set up columns and swim lanes.

Let's perform the following steps:

Setting up a workflow using columns and streams of work with swim-lanes, in addition to styling rules, makes visualizing requirements a lot easier. As you can see in the following screenshot, the columns have an information icon, which reflects the Definition of done setup through the team configuration dialog:

I've briefly touched on WIP limits in the implementation steps. To optimize the flow of value, you want to identify and eliminate bottlenecks. Bottlenecks indicate that waste exists in the overall workflow process. By monitoring your Kanban board over time, you can learn where bottlenecks occur. When several items sit in a column that hasn't worked for several days, a bottleneck has occurred. Bottlenecks typically occur when WIP limits are too high. On the other hand, no bottlenecks could indicate that WIP limits are too low. There is no right answer to what the correct WIP limit is for a column; this is something that can be discovered using empirical data by using the process and tools over time. 

The TFS marketplace features the free Query based boards extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=realdolmen.querybasedboards), which was created by RealDolmen, and allows you to visualize the result of work item queries on a board. After installing the extension, navigate to the Work hub and select Queries. When opening a query, a new tab called Board will be available to visualize the results on a board:

The extension is available as a dashboard widget, as well as a subpage in the work hub. The Activity Feed gives a summary of all the recent changes that have been made to work items, commits, pull requests, and builds. It tells you who changed a task, who logged a bug, and who committed code. The extension supports configuration, so you can decide to filter out what's not relevant or simply configure which backlogs work updates should be published from. Some people would agree that the more boards, the merrier!

Let's start off by prioritizing the product backlog. To do this, navigate to the Backlog view for the PartsUnlimited example team. Frequently reviewing and prioritizing your backlog can help your team know what's most important to deliver next. Reorder your backlog by simply dragging work items. Alternatively, if you prefer the keyboard route, hold the Alt key and use the up and down arrows:

A prioritized backlog without an estimate of how big the work is only half as good. It is suggested that software development teams review and resize the backlog multiple times in a sprint, as this keeps the backlog in a ready state for future sprint planning sessions. While there are many sizing techniques, Fibonacci numbers are a good way to size the work into logical buckets. Once the work items have an estimate, you can use the Forecast tool to get an idea of how many items you can complete within a sprint. By plugging in velocity, you can see which items are within scope for the set of sprints the team has activated. Teams use the forecast tool to help their sprint planning efforts. By plugging in a value for the team velocity, the Forecast tool will show which items in the backlog can be completed within future sprints. Both tools are team-specific tools that rely on the team's ability to estimate backlog items:

With a sized and prioritized backlog in place, there is just one more thing left to do before you start to plan the sprint. To quickly get started, you can use the default sprints, also referred to as iterations, that were added when your team project was created. Note that you must be a member of the Project Administrators group in order to add sprints and schedule sprint dates. Choose Iteration under the Backlog tab and then click the dates to edit them. With the dates configured, you are now ready for sprint planning:

Sprint planning is a real team effort and a great way to get everybody aligned. The planning is kicked off by discussing the sprint goal. The Product Owner then shares the vision of the sprint goal with the team. The appropriate PBIs (which should be on top of the backlog by now) are selected to meet this sprint goal. Follow these steps to get started:

The Product Owner then starts reading the stories out and going through the acceptance criteria. This is a great opportunity to briefly discuss and clarify any requirements or acceptance criteria. Team velocity is a good measure of how many story points of backlog items the team takes into the sprint. The TFS marketplace features the quick calc extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=duffy.vsts-quick-calcs), a free extension that was developed by Mike Duffy and allows you to quickly see total effort, % complete, and other metrics for a selection of work items. This is especially useful during a sprint planning meeting when you want quick answers on the total count of story points for the selected work items. This extension is shown in the following screenshot:

Next, the team needs to know the total available capacity within the sprint. The availability of each individual and their role can be tracked using the capacity tools in TFS. Whereas velocity correlates your team estimate requirements, capacity correlates to actual task time. Capacity takes into account variations in work hours of team members, as well as holidays, vacation days, and non-working days. Most teams specify the capacity in terms of hours, but you can also specify it in days if you so wish:

Now, you have a clear view of how much work your team can commit to. In the next part of the sprint planning meeting, the team creates a plan of work by breaking the requirements into tasks and then estimating them. Tasks capture the plan of action and add as many tasks as needed to capture the work required to complete each item. Tasks can represent different work that needs to be done, such as design, code, test, content, and sign off. TFS makes the process of adding tasks friction free, giving you the ability to access and add task functionality from multiple entry points without any overhead. Tasks can be added right from the sprint backlog, the sprint board, and the product backlog board:

You can capture as much detail as you need in the task, including the effort estimate to complete the work. The effort estimate is netted against the actual capacity to provide a view of whether the work has been overscheduled:

With the team capacity set up, the product backlog decomposed, and the tasks estimated, the sprint plan is ready. The team members can now allocate work to themselves by dragging the tasks to their names:

After you've defined all the tasks for all the items, check whether your team is at or over capacity. If your team is under capacity, you can consider adding more items to the sprint. If your team is over capacity, you'll want to remove items out of the backlog. Next, check whether any team member is under, at, or over capacity, or if someone hasn't even been assigned any work. Use the capacity bars to determine this. Once you have done this, the sprint backlog provides a view that should allow you to start delivering your sprint with confidence:

The TFS marketplace features the Sprint Goal extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=keesschollaart.sprint-goal), a free extension that was created by Kees Schollaart allows you to record the sprint goal in sprint planning tools. Once you've installed the extension, you'll see a new tab called Sprint goal in the sprint planning tools. This is a great way to make the sprint goal visible to the entire team. 

Sometimes, people with unique skills are shared across multiple teams, which makes it hard to track their available capacity. The TFS marketplace features the team capacity management extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tfc.team-capacity), which was created by TFS consulting and provides an overview of the assigned capacity of individual team members across multiple teams within a team project. This gives you a bird's-eye view of capacity across all the teams in the team project. It provides a single pane of glass so that you can see where the team members are active and how much of their time has been allocated:

The sprint burndown chart is a great indicator of whether the team will be able to complete all remaining work within the sprint time box, and the taskboard helps you visualize the remaining work on each task. The Sprint Drop Plan extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=yanivsegev.Drop-plan-extension), which was created by Yaniv Segev, is an organizational tool that helps team members sync their tasks by visualizing their work status and dependencies on a sprint-based calendar.

Once you've installed the extension from the marketplace, you'll see a new tab called Drop Plan in the sprint tools:

When you hover over a task of interest, the drop plan will render dependency links out to tasks that are related to the task you have selected, in addition to the product backlog item all the tasks are linked to. In this case, you now know that the product backlog item has three key tasks in flight, one of which is only likely to complete on the last day of the sprint. This gives you an opportunity to discuss the order in which the tasks are scheduled. For example, in this case, if you think the task scheduled for the last day of the sprint has more value, it should be brought forward in place of something else. In addition to this, the extension allows you to visualize an individual's and team's days off, as well as blocked tasks:

The team foundation marketplace features the Team Calendar extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-devlabs.team-calendar), which was created by the Microsoft DevLabs team and helps busy teams stay on track and informed about important deadlines, sprint schedules, and upcoming milestones. Team Calendar is the one place where you can view and manage the dates that are important to your teams, including sprint schedule, days off (for individuals or the team), and custom events:

Install thedelivery plans extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms.vss-plans) from the marketplace. Developed and maintained by Microsoft, this extension is free for all TFS users except stakeholders. With the extension installed, you'll see the Plans page in the work hub:

To see all the features of the Plans extension, you need multiple teams and projects. Use the sample data widget we discussed in the Getting social with work items recipe to create multiple projects. Since delivery plans are based on creating a portfolio of work in flight, it relies on a sprint's schedules for the teams.

Let's perform the following steps:

Last but not least, similar to other boards, the plans also support customizing cards. This allows you to surface more information by including more fields in work item cards.  

With the configuration for the plan complete, the final result is a delivery board that rolls up the work items from multiple teams and projects into a single view along with markers. The board supports all drag and drop operations and makes it really easy to use this view to take actions during planning and tracking sessions. As teams continue to become more distributed and the size/scope of work continues to grow, delivery plans make it easy to visualize your portfolio of teams and projects from across the organization:

The plans view allows you to create as many plans as you want, while the search functionality makes it really easy to search for your plan. The Mark as favorite feature allows you to get to your favorite plans quickly.

Every team project is created with a default dashboard. You can access the PartsUnlimited dashboard by navigating to the dashboard hub. Anyone with access to the team project, including stakeholders, can view dashboards. Dashboards use widgets to surface information. There is no limit on how many dashboards you can create. Let's start off by creating a new dashboard for sprint 1. At this point, don't add any widgets to the dashboard. Click the Settings icon in the top right-hand corner of the page and select the option to auto-refresh the sprint 1 dashboard. Auto-refresh keeps the dashboard up-to-date; it's fantastic if you intend to project the dashboard view on a television screen. 

The TFS marketplace features the Product Vision widget (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=agile-extensions.product-vision), a free extension that was developed by Agile extensions and allow you to make product vision visible to the whole team by surfacing it to a dashboard via a widget. The sprint countdown widget (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-devlabs.CountdownWidget) is also a free extension and was developed by the Microsoft DevLabs team, and allows you to count down to a configurable moment in time, or down to the end of the current sprint.

Let's perform the following steps:

Widgets use the TFS REST API to retrieve information. The dashboard canvas allows you to move widgets aroundand scale them to different sizes. Widgets support interactivity; for example, clicking on the Query Tile would take you straight into the Work Item Query window. Once the widgets on the dashboard have been configured, you'll see output similar to the following:

The TFS marketplace (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?term=widget&target=VSTS&category=All%20categories&hosting=onpremises&sortBy=Relevance) features a lot of useful widgets, with an evergrowing collection of widgets – some of which will be of interest to you.