Azure Boards provides interactive and customized tools for software development teams to manage their projects. It has a wide range of features, such as native support for Agile, Scrum, and Kanban processes, calendar views, configurable dashboards, and integrated reporting. These tools adapt to your company.
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Azure Boards Overview
The Microsoft Azure board is a tool for managing software development work within Microsoft Azure. It is primarily used in Azure DevOps to help organize work and daily activities for the team.
All of the team’s work is tracked on Azure boards, and the Tailspin team will use Azure Board to gain a better picture of the work that needs to be done and prioritize it. It also offers expanded support for Scrum, Kanban, and configurable dashboards, as well as integrated reporting.
When a team of more than one developer or user collaborates, the Microsoft Azure board service allows users to track software development progress or tasks linked with different people.
Consider it an interface that allows you to track activities, features, and even defects that may be related to your project. Three categories of job items can help you here:
Here is a visual representation:
Also, as the work progresses, the status is updated stage by stage from:
The image below depicts the same thing:
Every time we create or add an issue, task, or epic, we are producing a work item. Every piece of work we produce would be a representation of an object. This object is saved in the work item data storage. Every item in this section will be given an identifier. These IDs are specific to a project.
Epics are used to track key features or requirements. Issues, on the other hand, are used to monitor user stories, defects, or other smaller pieces of work. Similarly, tasks are designed to track little quantities of labor. The tracker can be used on an hourly or daily basis.
Azure Boards features
Let’s have a look at some of the key features of Azure boards:
- The installation of Kanban is a crucial part of Azure Boards since it manages two of the most important tasks: prioritizing problem backlogs and updating issue statuses.
It suggests that using Azure boards has made it lot simpler to assign work, and that you can schedule information sharing to happen more frequently so that you can prioritize work—which is essential right now. In addition, you can effortlessly prioritize your tasks by using the drag-and-drop tool.
- Additionally, Azure Boards give you the ability to collaborate successfully to guarantee that all development work is accomplished without fail. You can communicate with the other people working on the project more simply by using the special “Discussion” area.
You may create dashboards and start tracking the job’s status or trends thanks to it. Then you may establish trends or alerts for issues that are generated, modified, or resolved. You can also create notifications for any issue creation or modification.
- The option to create sprints with the best tasks is another benefit of Azure Boards. You can use the estimations to project how much work will be needed to finish the project. You can also move forward with distributing assignments or issues.
Azure Boards’ seamless connectivity with GitHub, which enables you to complete pull, commit, and push requests with ease, is its best feature. It seeks to boost the team’s overall productivity. Simply link the Azure Boards to the GitHub repositories, then work on assigning the correct work items to the PRs and commits.
Reasons to Use Azure Boards
The main goal of Microsoft Azure Boards is to assist you in planning and monitoring your work activities as a software project. In addition to Azure Boards, there are other tracking alternatives available. What distinguishes it from the competition then? Here are a few justifications for using it.
- Simple to Start, Easy to Grow
Some of the pre-defined work item categories are readily made available to you by Azure Board via the interface. It will help in keeping track of user stories, tasks, problems, and features. Furthermore, you may use the Kanban board or product backlog to swiftly stand up and sprint.
Whatever Agile method you choose, it claims to give you all the resources you need to deploy it. You can decide to add teams or users to your company in order to accommodate its ongoing expansion.
The Microsoft Azure Boards interface makes it simple to create or manage Kanban boards, delivery plans, and task boards. When using Kanban boards, users may quickly modify or establish card styles, swim lanes, available data, and much more. You can ask a single hub for configuration using a standard dialogue.
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- Easy Tracking of all the Information
Due to the work items’ creation for this purpose, you can simply keep track of all the information. You can alter rich text, drag and drop inline images, and input larger resources. You can add up to 100 attachments and each one can be up to 60MB in size.
You can also link the work items in a straightforward or hierarchical manner. Every modification made to a work item is recorded, and you can view this data whenever you want to see who made what changes and when.
- Built-in Dashboards & Analytics
Microsoft Azure Boards let you gain access to a variety of tools and create useful reports for tracking trends.
Additionally, dashboards that may be customized allow you to add widgets to display data and information. The Analytics service, which is intended for server-based and read-only aggregations, will then be prioritized for your use.
Utilizing Power BI and Analytics views, you may create extremely complex reports using the project’s data.
Conclusion
These are just a few crucial Azure Boards facts that demonstrate the utility of this Microsoft service. There is more to discover because Azure Boards allows you to add up to 5 free members and is free to use at first. Additionally, there is no restriction on how many stakeholders you can add to your Azure Boards site.