Showing posts with label Azure Boards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Azure Boards. Show all posts

Wednesday 5 January 2022

Azure DevOps Series - Azure Boards

Azure Boards are used for managing software projects.  Regardless of the approach Azure Boards support multiple frameworks and integrate well with tooling such as Visual Studio as you IDE.  Microsoft strap line for Azure Boards is "Plan, track and discuss work across your teams".

You need to login to Azure DevOps and Create an Organisation, in the image below I have two organisation.  

Next I need to create a new project, the image below shows the options.  For Source Control most teams and people choose Git, I came from TFS which is now Team Foundation Version Control and before that Visual Source Safe with various other version control systems but Git is now far more widely used.  I have chosen to make my project "Private".  Lastly, I need to select the Work Item Process.  I prefer to use the "Agile" process templates for Scrum and not the Scrum Templates as I prefer to use User Stories over Product Backlog Items (PBIs) in my Backlog.  I follow the hierarchy Epic, Feature, User Story, Task.  And the "Agile" Template gives the correct naming and board in DevOps.  


Go to "Project Setting" > "Project Configuration" and update the iterations to match your sprint dates as shown below.

Add a new Epic (Top level Item)


There is a little configuration to get your queries and boards setup correctly.

Azure DevOps Series Posts:

  1. Azure DevOps Series - Overview
  2. Azure DevOps Series - Azure Boards (This Post)
  3. Missing
  4. Azure DevOps Series - Azure Pipelines
  5. Azure DevOps Series - DevSecOps

Thursday 30 December 2021

Azure DevOps Series - Overview

Azure DevOps is a SaaS platform that provides tools for deploying software using DevOps techniques generally within Agile software delivery projects.  DevOps is useful for gathering requirements, building the solution, performing daily “integration builds”, and having deliverable end-of-sprint demos.  The key to building software today versus several years ago is that we should automate as much as possible.  Azure DevOps provides excellent tooling to automate and implement automation results in better quality, reduced timelines.  Building software is easy as long as you have great people and precise requirements.  Agile practices and DevOps processes and tooling can help get you to the desired state.

  1. Azure Boards are great for planning and getting the requirements cleanly broken down.
  2. Visual Studio coupled with Azure boards items with Azure Repos (source control options are GitHub & TFVS) is ideal for the development using most languages such as C#, NodesJS, Angular, React, TypeScript.
  3. Azure Pipelines are good at deploying solutions by setting up the infrastructure (I prefer to use PaaS and get out of the Infrastructure world, using ARM templates) and deploying code with the appropriate DTAP environment configuration.  Azure Test Plans are used to verify builds. 
  4. Monitor and Alert – Azure Monitor/App Insights is ideal for monitoring the infrastructure and operating code to detect issues early.
  5. Azure Artifacts help create and share Nuget code packages.

More Info: