The Basics

Have you ever worked on a team of smart people who can’t seem to get anything done? They know how to get tasks done but can’t seem to manage and organize it all. This kind of team seems to always miss deadlines and fall short on the work they promise on a regular basis. It happens to all of us to some degree, but it doesn’t have to.

Azure Boards is a project management system for software projects. It supports common development concepts like user stories, bugs, Kanban boards, and more. And it provides a complete system for managing work.

In this chapter, you’re going to see what Azure Boards is all about. You’ll get a crash course in Azure Boards and run through a project you’ve probably experienced before: sprint planning.

Azure Boards: The basics

Azure Boards (Boards) is a feature of Azure DevOps that helps teams manage work. Boards is a combination of elements that interact to help keep a software development project organized and on schedule.

Boards has various processes that dictate the behavior of many features. In this chapter, we’ll be assuming you’re using the Agile_processAgile_process. .

Boards is not just made up of boards. It has a few different components that help software teams stay organized:

• Work items
• Backlogs
• Sprints
• Boards

Let’s look at these components one at a time.