Essentials on Azure DevOps Services

and GitHub
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Introduction and Logistics
• Your trainer
• You:
o Your role
o Your company
o Your experience in this technology area
o Your goals for this workshop

• Start and end times

• Facilities (restrooms and smoking)
• Meals
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Module 7: Azure Boards -
Plan and Track Projects

Module Overview

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Overview
• Agile Planning Tools
• Kanban Tools
• Agile Portfolio Management
• Charts, Dashboards, and Widgets

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Module 7: Azure Boards - Plan
and Track Projects

Lesson 1: Agile Planning Tools

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Overview
• Planning Basics
• Product Backlog
• Portfolio Backlog
• Manage Bugs
• Sprints
• Sprint Planning
• Taskboard

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Planning Basics - Backlogs
• You build your project plan by creating a backlog of work items that represent the features, requirements,
user stories, or other work to perform.

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Planning Basics - Sprints
• The Scrum method uses sprints to plan work to perform by a team within a specific time period and
cadence.

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Planning Basics - Kanban
• Kanban uses a visual interactive board to plan and show progress using cards. Your Kanban board is fully
customizable to support the workflow used by your team.

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Three classes of backlogs, two types of boards
• To manage work, you have access to three classes of backlogs—Portfolio, Product, and Sprint—and two
types of boards—Kanban and Task. Backlogs list work items, boards display work items as cards.

• Backlog and board views provide similar and distinct features to support planning and tracking.

• System work item types on backlogs and boards.

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Product Backlog
• Ordered list of the work to be done to create, maintain, and sustain a product

• Repository of all the information you need to track and share with your team

• Living artifact: Team adds detailed information to backlog items so as to break them down into
smaller items, prioritize and estimate them over the course of the project

• Product backlog items (PBIs) at the top of the backlog are more refined than items at the bottom

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Product Backlog

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Portfolio Backlog
• Organize backlog into a hierarchical structure

• Use portfolio backlogs to:

o Manage a portfolio of features that are supported by different development and management teams
o Group items into a release train
o Minimize size variability of deliverables by breaking down a large feature into smaller backlog items

• Add and group items into a hierarchy, drill up or down within the hierarchy, reorder and reparent
items, and filter hierarchical views

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Portfolio Backlog
Backlog hierarchy for Scrum projects

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Portfolio Backlog
Backlog hierarchy for Scrum projects Backlog hierarchy for Agile projects

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Working with Bugs
• Bugs can be treated as:
o Requirements
▪ Appear in product backlog, sprint backlogs, and Kanban board
▪ Associated with Requirements category
o Tasks
▪ Appear in Sprint backlogs and Task boards
▪ Associated with Task category
o Not managed on backlogs and boards
▪ Associated with Bugs category

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Sprints
• Teams can plan and track work at regular time intervals

• Sprints correspond to the periods of time during which specific work has to be completed and
made ready for review

• Teams usually choose a two-week or three-week cadence

o Sprints are defined with start and end dates

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Sprints
• Define the sprints for your Team

• Each Team can have its own

iterations/sprints

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Sprint Planning
• Identify work that needs to be completed

• Pull items off of the backlog onto your sprint

• Check the total level of effort of your sprint items

• Balance work with team capacity

o Configure the work hours or days that the team has for each sprint
o With capacity bars, you can quickly see who is over, at, or under capacity
o For capacity to work correctly, you need to define the start and end date for each sprint

• Define tasks to complete each item

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Sprint Backlog
Capacity planning Sprint Planning
Filter sprints

Add Tasks Total effort

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Taskboard
• Use the task board to update daily
tasks

• Interactive progress board for work

required to complete the sprint
backlog

• Tracks the state of each task and

provides an overall status update

• Grouping available by Backlog Item or

Team Member

• Filtering is also available

• Live updates

• Stakeholders now have the ability

move work items across board
columns on taskboards. Microsoft Confidential
Demo 1: Agile Planning Tools

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Lesson Knowledge Check
1. True/False: Agile planning follows a big and upfront ‘master plan’
2. How can you reorder the backlog?
3. What are the two views that the task board provides?

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Lesson Summary
In this lesson, you learned about:
o Agile Planning
o Product Backlog
o Portfolio Backlog
o Managing Bugs
o Sprints
o Sprint Planning
o Taskboard

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Module 7: Azure Boards - Plan
and Track Projects

Lesson 2: Kanban Tools

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Overview
• Kanban Basics
• Map the Flow of How Your Team Works
• Set Work In Progress (WIP) Limits
• Split the Columns
• Swimlanes
• Definition of Done
• Customize Cards

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Kanban Basics
• Visualize your work

• Manage flow

• Limit work in progress

• Make policies explicit

• Create opportunity for feedback

• Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally

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Track Work in Progress
• See at a glance the estimated size of work for each item which displays at the bottom right of each
card.

• Add items to your backlog in the first column. When priorities change, move items up and down
within a column.

• And, as work completes in one stage, update the status of an item by moving it to a downstream
stage.

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Map the Flow of How Your Team Works
• One column represents each workflow state

• Columns vary based on the process used to create your project

• Customize your Kanban columns to map the team’s workflow stages

• Stakeholders now have the ability move work items across board columns on Kanban boards

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Set Work In Progress (WIP) Limits
• Flow of work can be managed by setting WIP limits

• Provide feedback when appropriate but not prevent a team from taking on additional work

• This practice help teams identify bottlenecks, improve their process, and increase the quality of
software they ship.

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Split the Columns
• When split, each column contains two sub-columns: Doing and Done

• Lets your team implement a pull model

• Push items into Done, pull items into Doing

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Swimlanes
• Visualize the status of work that supports different service-level classes

• Create a swimlane to represent any other dimension that supports your tracking needs

• Drag items into a swimlane or reorder them within the lane

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Add Task Checklists
Task checklists provide a quick and easy way to track
elements of work that are important to support
completion of a backlog item

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Add, Run, and Update Inline Tests
You can quickly define inline tests, or a set of manual
tests, for a backlog item from your Kanban board. Not
only can you add tests, you can run them and update
their status.

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Inline Field Update
• Edit and update field in the card without opening work item form.

• To edit empty field, click the “Down” arrow to show the field.

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Definition of Done
• Show the essential tasks to complete before moving an item into a downstream stage

• Make processes and policies explicit

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Customize Cards
• Increase or simplify the information that displays
on your cards

• Add fields and update them from the board

• Change how cards display on the Kanban board

• Configure how tests appear and behave on the

card

• Show bugs on backlogs and boards

• Add parent field to work item cards

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Customize Cards
With styling rules, you can cause cards to change color when their corresponding work items meet criteria
that you set.
Work items Criteria

High priority items Priority = 1

High effort items Effort > 20 or Story Points > 20

Stale items unchanged in the last 5 days Changed Date > @Today-5

Title contains a key word Title Contains Yes

Severity 1 bugs Severity = 1 - Critical AND Work Item Type = Bug

High value business items Business Value > 50

Items assigned to specific feature area Area Path Under Fabrikam Fiber\Phone

Contains specific tag Tags Contain RTM

Blocked tasks (Scrum process only) Blocked = Yes

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View the Progress of Epics and Features on the Kanban Board

Backlog for Features

Kanban Board for

Features

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Demo 2: Kanban Tools

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Lesson Knowledge Check
1. What happens when a column exceeds the WIP limit?
2. What is the advantage of creating Swimlanes?
3. True/False: You can only track PBIs on the Kanban board.

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Lesson Summary
In this lesson, you learned about:
o Using the Kanban board to optimize work flow
o Mapping the flow of how your team works
o Setting WIP limits to constrain work in progress
o Splitting the columns
o Swimlanes
o The definition of done
o Customizing cards

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Module 7: Azure Boards - Plan
and Track Projects

Lesson 3: Agile Portfolio

Management

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Overview
• Agile Portfolio Management
• Working with Multiple Teams
• Review Team Deliverables Using Plans

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Agile Portfolio Management
• Manage backlog across multiple teams

• Management and Team views

• Multiple levels above backlog item

• Features
• Epics
• <your own custom>

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Working with Multiple Teams
• Setting up a hierarchical team structure provides several advantages to portfolio and program
managers for tracking progress across several teams

• Agile tools provide teams the ability to work autonomously and collaborate with other teams across
the enterprise

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Agile Portfolio Management - SAFe Example

Examples using Scaled Agile

Framework (SAFe):

• Portfolio, program, and team

levels

• Feature teams use User Stories

and Tasks

• Management teams use Features

and Epics

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Agile Portfolio Management - SAFe Example

• Add a team for each feature team and

management area

• Move the areas paths associated with

feature teams from a flat structure to
a hierarchical structure

• Include sub-area paths for the

management teams

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Agile Portfolio Management - SAFe Example

• Define a single sprint cadence for

all teams

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Agile Portfolio Management - Management View of Team Progress

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Review Team Delivery Plan
• Delivery plan, provides tailor-made
views across several teams and their
development backlogs—stories,
features, or epics.
• Drive alignment across teams by
overlaying several backlogs onto
your delivery schedule.
• Public preview for Delivery Plans 2.0
as of November 12th update.
• Bringing Delivery Plans into the core
product, rather than requiring an
extension to be installed.
• Enabling work items to span iteration
boundaries.
• Enabling drag and drop borders to
show when a work item starts and
ends.
• Enabling stakeholders to view plans. Microsoft Confidential
Using Delivery Plan
• Scale the size of the cards
• Click a card to view the details of a
backlog item
• Scroll horizontally to shift timeline
• Scroll vertically to view teams that
appear lower within the plan view
• Expand or collapse a single team
row
• Expand or collapse all team rows
• Edit the plan and change the fields
displayed on the cards
• Update backlog item's iteration via
drag and drop

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In a nutshell…
• Backlogs display work items as a list and boards display them as cards
• You use your product backlog to quickly plan and prioritize your work
• You use your sprint backlogs and taskboards when you work in Scrum
• You use your Kanban board to update work status and when you employ Kanban methods
• Each backlog is associated with a board, changes to priority and order you make in one are reflected in its
corresponding board
• Plans allow you to review the deliverables for several teams across sprints and a calendar schedule
• Backlogs, boards, and plans are configurable for each team
Demo 3: Agile Portfolio
Management Capabilities

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Lesson Knowledge Check
1. True/False: It is possible to set up hierarchical teams and backlogs
2. What tool is used to drive cross-team visibility and alignment by tracking work status?

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Lesson Summary
In this lesson, you learned about:
o Agile Portfolio Management
o Working with Multiple Teams
o Delivery Plans

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Module 7: Azure Boards - Plan
and Track Projects

Lesson 4: Charts, Dashboards,

and Widgets

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Overview
• Charts
• Dashboards

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Charts
• You can add most charts to a team dashboard to get a
unified picture of trends you want to monitor

• You can chart the results of a flat-list query

• You can create several types of charts—such as pie,

column, or trend—for the same query

• Charts support viewing a count of work items or a sum of

values for select numeric fields, such as Remaining Work
or Original Estimate

• You use cumulative flow diagrams to monitor the flow of

work through a system

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Charts – Sprint Burndown
• Determine if your team is on track to complete
its sprint plan

• Used for adaptive and frequent re-planning

• You check the following indicators:

o Is remaining work getting updated regularly? Flat spaces
within the blue area indicate a lack of updates.

o Is remaining work increasing instead of decreasing?

Increases can indicate unestimated or unplanned work.
Both signal a need for the team to discuss how they'll
complete the sprint tasks on time.

o Based on the actual burn rate, does the team feel

confident that they'll complete the work by the end of
the sprint?

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Charts - Velocity and Forecasting
• Each backlog item is estimated in ‘points’

• History of work done is team’s ‘Velocity’

• Velocity determines the estimated work that can be completed in

future sprints

• The green bar corresponds to the total estimated effort of backlog

items completed within the sprint

• The blue bar corresponds to the estimated effort of items not yet
completed

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Charts - Velocity and Forecasting
Use Velocity and Forecasting to get an idea of how many and which items you can complete within a
sprint

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Charts - Cumulative Flow (CFD)
• Cumulative flow monitors the flow of work through a
system.

• Cumulative flow accessible for your backlog or portfolio

backlog by clicking the image in the upper-right corner of
the Kanban board page.

• The two primary metrics to track:

o Cycle time: Measures the time it takes to move work
through a single process or workflow state, calculated by the
start of the given process to the start of the subsequent
process.
o Lead time
▪ For a continuous flow process: measures the amount of time it
takes from when a request is made (such as adding a proposed
user story) until that request is completed (closed).

For a sprint or fixed period process: measures the time from

when work on a request begins until the work is completed (i.e.
the time from Active to Closed).
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Charts - Track Test Status
• Quickly view the status of your testing using lightweight charts.

• Find out how many test cases are ready to run, or how many tests are passing and failing in each test
suite.

• You can pin these charts to your home page, then the team can see the progress at a glance.

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Dashboards
• Create multiple dashboards in projects

• Share information, access quick links and

other functions, and view status, progress,
and trends

• Show recent changes made to source

control folders, build status, and charts
created from work item queries

• Easily add and rearrange widgets on the

dashboard

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Demo 4: Charts, Dashboards
and Widgets

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Lesson Knowledge Check
1. List three kind of widgets that you can add on the dashboards
2. Which chart illustrates the progress and remaining amount of work to be done?

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Lesson Summary
In this lesson, you learned about:
o Charts
o Dashboards

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Lab: Plan and Track Projects

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Module Summary
In this module, you learned about:
o Agile Planning Tools
o Kanban Tools
o Agile Portfolio Management
o Charts, Dashboards and Widgets

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