Chandrasekara Chaminda - Hands-on Azure boards: configuring and customizing process workflows in Azure DevOps services

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/978-1-4842-5045-7 . For more detailed information, please visit www.apress.com/source-code .

Technology is evolving faster than ever before, and modern software is expanding into each and every industry and sector in society. Most businesses and peoples day-to-day lives are closely intertwined with technology and software. To come up with innovative solutions for the software needs of modern industry, it is vital for software firms to continuously improve their software delivery processes.

The continuous improvement of software delivery processes requires the work being carried out to be tracked, effectively providing traceability and visibility. Predictability plays a key role in the success of this work and is essential for identifying trends or work patterns in teams, risks, and bottlenecks, and for addressing them in a timely manner with proper capacity, risk management, and skill planning.

Azure Boards comes with Kanban boards, backlogs, team dashboards, and custom reporting to help you turn an idea into a working piece of software. Comprehensive traceability is available with flexible work item tracking, allowing you to plan your work in iterations/sprints, and Azure Boards allows you to track your work from idea to the completion of implmenting the idea. Azure Boardsin combination with Azure repos, pipelines, artifacts, and testsoffers visibility and traceability in every step of the software delivery process.

As the first book in the Hands-on Azure DevOps series, Hands-on Azure Boards covers the capabilities of Azure Boards comprehensively. We describe the features of the built-in templates that you can use to run your software delivery teams with Agile, Scrum, or CMMI processes. We give hands-on lessons for configuring Azure Boards to behave in the way you want and to emit the information you need, including when customizing and building your own process workflows. These lessons will give you a broader and in-depth understanding of the tool. Advanced topics include administering and setting up a command-line interface, using a REST API for custom reporting or any other needs, setting up security and permissions, and setting up and managing small to large teams. Hands-on Azure Boards is the book that project managers/Scrum masters, team members, and anyone involved in the software delivery process can use as a day-to-day reference manual to improve the way they work. You can use it to convert your software delivery process to a real implementation using the Azure Boards capabilities that are available in the Azure DevOps on-premises servers and services.

We are thankful for all the mentors who have encouraged and helped us during our careers and who have provided us with so many opportunities to gain the maturity and the courage we needed to write this book.

We would also like to thank our friends and colleagues who have helped and encouraged us in so many ways.

Last, but in no way least, we owe a huge debt to our families, not only because they have put up with late-night typing, research, and our permanent air of distraction, but also because they have had the grace to read what we have written. Our heartfelt gratitude is offered to them for helping us make this dream come true.