What are Azure Boards: Overview, Key Features and How to Start?

In my previous article, we discussed Azure DevOps and its components. This article elaborates on one of those components, Azure Boards. In the process, we explore how it helps to plan, track, and discuss work across different teams. Alternatively, you can also check out our Azure DevOps Training.

So, let us start by understanding what the term actually means.

What are Azure Boards?

Well, you can think of it as an interface that lets you track tasks, features, and even bugs that may be associated with your project. Here you are aided by three work item types:

• Epics
• Issues
• Tasks

Here is the depiction in the form of an image(Image Source: Microsoft.com):

Also, as the work gets completed, the status gets updated stage by stage from:

• To Do 
• Doing 
• Done

Here is the image below depicting the same (Image Source: Microsoft.com):

Each time we create or add an issue, task, or epic, it means we are creating a work item. Every work item we create would represent an object. This object is stored in the work item data store. Every item here will have an identifier assigned to it. These IDs are unique to a particular project.

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If you wish to track significant features or requirements, you add epics. Issues, on the other hand, are used to track user stories, bugs, or other smaller items of work. Likewise, tasks are meant to monitor a small amount of work. The tracker can be used for both hourly and daily tracking.

Now, let us take a look at some of the features of Azure Boards.

Features Of Azure Boards

Kanban Implementation

It is very easy to implement and use Kanban with Azure Boards. It eases up two important tasks, those are:

• Update the status of issues
• Prioritize Your Backlog of Issues

This means assigning work becomes much easier, and you can share information better and prioritize your work with the drag-and-drop features provided.

Collaborate using Azure Boards.

• The Discussion section lets you collaborate better with the people in your project
• You can create dashboards and track the status and trends of the accomplished work. Get instant alerts for the issues created, changed or resolved
• You can set notifications to get alerted when an issue is created or changed

Flexibility to work in sprints and to implement Scrum

• It becomes easier to plan sprints with proper assignment
• You can use effort estimates to predict work
• It is possible to assign issues or tasks in bulk

Integrate with GitHub

It is easy to connect to GitHub and in turn it means:

• You can perform pull, push and commit requests with ease
• You can link to GitHub commits and pull requests with ease

Let us now move further and see how we can use Azure Boards to carry out some of the features we discussed above. You can even check out the details of Azure with the Azure Cloud Engineer Certification.

Demo: Getting Started with Azure Boards

Step1: Start by opening this link in your browser ‘https://aex.dev.azure.com/signup/boards’. You would be re-directed to this page. Click on Continue.

Step2: Next you would be asked to enter the organisation name and the location where you are operating from. Enter those and click on continue.

Step3: Next step is to create a project. Enter the details below and create a project.

Step 4: You will be redirected to the following interface. It has four sections. The first one gives you access to all the major tabs of Azure Boards. The second one lets you add items. The third one is for issues, and the fourth one lets you manage projects and project members.

Step5: Let us create an issue, to do that click on issues drop down on top left corner of your screen and select issue.

Step6: Click on Add Item and enter the name of the issue. Once you hit the enter button, the issue tab would appear as below.

Step7: We can change the state to Doing and your item would shift under the column named Doing.

Step8: You can add tasks to the issue. This bit covers what needs to be done. I have added three tasks and I have crossed one suggesting the task was complete.

So guys this was about adding a simple issue to your Azure boards. There is a lot that can be done with Azure boards. You are free to explore Azure Boards. As far as this article is concerned. I would be resting it here. In case if you like Cloud Computing and DevOps. You may want to check out this AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Training by Edureka which is catered to meet all the AWS and DevOps needs the learners may have.

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