[Free Agile Project Management Tool With Sprints, Epics, Kanban Board
Everardo Laboy
Azure Boards provides a choice of Agile planning tools, many of which work in combination with each other. This article provides a get-started guide for project managers new to Azure Boards. If you and your teams want to take a minimal tracking approach to plan and manage your projects, start with this guide. Also, if you're moving from waterfall project management to Agile methods, start with this guide.
Free Agile Project Management Tool with Sprints, Epics, Kanban Board
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Most of the guidance in this article is valid for both the cloud and on-premises versions. However, some of the features included in this article, such as Rollup, Analytics, and some portfolio planning tools, are only available for the cloud at this time.
Azure Boards provides each team with a set of Agile tools to plan and track work. Each project defines a default team, which you can start using immediately. If you have several development or feature teams, we recommend that you define a team in Azure DevOps for each feature team. This way, each team can work autonomously while collaborating with each other.
Sprints specified by iteration paths are defined for a project and then selected by teams. A sprint cadence can vary between one week to four weeks or longer. Also, you can define sprints within a hierarchy that includes release trains. You assign work to sprints that teams commit to deliver at the end of the sprint. These Azure Boards tools rely on sprint assignments to a team's Sprint backlogs, Taskboard, and Forecast and Delivery plans.
Determine which work item types your team can use to capture customer requirements and development work. If your project is based on the Agile process, we recommend that you use the User Story, Bug, and Feature work item types.
Each team can configure how they manage Bug work items, at the same level as User Story or Task work items, by configuring the Working with bugs setting. For more information about using these work item types, see Agile process.
Each team can configure how they manage bugs, at the same level as product backlog items or Tasks, by configuring the Working with bugs setting. For more information about using these work item types, see Scrum process.
Each team can configure how they manage bugs, at the same level as requirements or tasks, by configuring the Working with bugs setting. For more information about using these work item types, see CMMI process.
Requirements specify expectations of users for a software product. In Azure Boards, requirements are defined by work items that appear on your product backlog. They correspond to User Story (Agile), Product backlog item (Scrum), Issue (Basic), or Requirement (CMMI) work item types based on the process selected for your project. They also belong to the Requirements category, which manages the work item types that appear on the product backlog.
As project managers, you manage the features and the development team manages the requirements. When you map them by using parent-child links, you gain visibility into the progress of your features. Each work item you add to your team backlog is automatically assigned the default area path and iteration path set for your team.
Create your product plan by using the features backlog. The development team then creates their product plan by using the product backlog. Periodically, you should review and refine your product plans.
Development teams add User Stories to their product backlog so that the User Story is automatically assigned the team's default area path and iteration path. Then, they can map those stories under each feature that represents the work required to implement the feature. Each User Story should be sized so that it can be completed within a sprint.
You can monitor team velocity based on estimates assigned to completed work or a simple count of work items completed during sprints. To use the Forecast feature, you must assign a value to the Story Points, Effort, or Size field. If you don't want to estimate requirements, you can simply assign a value of 1 to requirement estimates and then use the Forecast tool based on a count of work items.
With work item tags, team members can assign ad-hoc tags to work items. You can use these tags to filter backlogs and boards. You can also use them to query on work items. For tags to be useful to the team, provide some general guidance on how your team should use tags. Consider documenting this guidance in a central place, such as the project wiki.
To gain insight into what features can ship when, use the Forecast tool. This tool requires that you provide estimates to the Story Points, Effort, or Size field for each requirement. If you want to forecast on a simple count of work items, assign the value of 1 to requirement estimates.
First, you want to make sure that you're completing the requirements needed to ship features. As shown in the following image, the requirements backlog is ordered according to the features you want to ship. This ordering assumes that all requirements in a feature must be complete to ship it. Also, Story Points are assigned to each User Story.
With estimates assigned to each requirement, you can set a team velocity. In the following example, we specify 12 for the velocity, which is equivalent to stating that on average the team can complete 12 Story Points per sprint. The Forecast tool shows which requirements and features the team can complete within the next six sprints. When you use the Planning tool, you can quickly assign requirements to the forecasted sprints.
With a forecast of when a feature ships, you can update each feature's iteration path. Quickly assign values to a feature by adding those fields to the card on the Kanban board, as shown in the following image.
Milestone markers aren't used in Azure Boards work tracking, except for delivery plans. Delivery plans provide a calendar view and allow you to define a milestone marker. You can use one or more of the following options to mark a work item as a milestone:
In Microsoft Project, you manage tasks that depend on the completion of other tasks by linking them. To manage dependencies in Azure Boards, you can add similar linking by adding Predecessor/Successor link types to work items. Add these links from the Add link dialog for a work item.
Azure Boards supports many link types to track related work. Choose the Predecessor/Successor link types to track work with dependencies. A quick way to link work items is to add a tag to work items that participate in producing or consuming dependencies. Create a query that's based on the tag, and then add the required links.
You can view dependencies and identify dependencies that have issues with delivery plans. As shown in the following image, you can toggle the display of dependency lines between linked work items. For more information, see Track dependencies by using delivery plans.
Azure Boards doesn't provide a native view of the critical path. Agile methodologies favor a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) over Critical Path Management. By using MVP, you identify the shortest path and dependencies by prioritizing Epic, Feature, User Story, and Task work item types. For more context, see The critical path on Agile projects and Running a lean startup on Azure DevOps.
Marketplace extensions aren't supported features of Azure Boards, so they aren't supported by the product team. For questions, suggestions, or issues you have when you use these extensions, see their corresponding extension pages.
Sprints allow the development team to focus on completing a preselected set of work. Work assigned to a sprint appears on the team's sprint backlog. Sprint backlogs are defined only for product backlogs, not for portfolio backlogs.
Your Features board is another place to review progress and ensure the continuous flow of deliverables. The following image illustrates a customized Features board, including in-progress columns like Need more info, On Deck, In Progress, and Customer Rollout. These columns provide a more natural set of states as features get proposed, researched, designed, developed, and then deployed to production.
One quick and visual way to monitor progress is from the features backlog. By adding the rollup progress bar column, you can see what percentage of work items are completed for each feature, as shown in the following image.
To review features delivered across several teams, configure a delivery plan. Delivery plans provide an interactive board to review a calendar schedule of stories or features that several teams plan to deliver.
Continuous improvement is at the heart of Agile methods. To improve your processes, you need to have shared goals and a shared plan. To initiate process improvement activities, consider adding them through regular practices. You might want to:
From the team's Velocity chart, you can gain an understanding about how well the team is planning and executing a sprint. As shown in the following example, the Velocity chart shows the planned, completed, completed late, and incomplete count of work items for several sprints. Teams can review this chart to help determine how well they're estimating and executing and how they might improve.
I can create a Scrum or Kanban board and can use a JQL query to associate multiple projects to that board. But I am stuck as to what is the best approach for point 2 above. Should I use the concept of JIRA Epics to group issues in accordance to milestones? Or 'Versions'? Or should I even group those milestones into sprints?
Currently I am using Epics, but this causing a bit of confusion amongst the team, because after some iteration our backlog currently shows epics in a mixed order, in the sense that some issues for epics for 'Milestone A' appear in priority lower than some issues for 'Milestone B'. This can be fixed of course by re-distributing the issues to the correct Epic, but I wonder whether this is the correct approach, or if there is an alternative approach that is recommended.
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