Azure Boards Project Paper Cuts

Ali Tai

Today, we’re proud to announce Project Paper Cuts for Azure Boards. Inspired by GitHub’s Project Paper Cuts, we are taking a critical look at the rough edges of Azure Boards. We recognize that throughout the years, our product’s workflows have accumulated smaller issues and usability nitpicks which have failed to become part of bigger product initiatives. This is where Project Paper Cuts comes in.

What is a paper cut?

A paper cut is a small to medium-sized experience problem which our users hit day-to-day. It is an iteration on existing UI/UX, with a relatively quick fix. The goal of finding and fixing these paper cuts is to improve our users’ experience by focusing on small details to drive high impact on usability and productivity.

Ships

To give you an idea of the types of issues we are targeting, over the past few sprints we’ve shipped:

State ordering

States are now displayed in process order instead of alphabetically so you can intuitively progress work items through to completion!

Work item rule consistency

We cleaned up multiple work item transition rules that have been inconsistent across different processes and work item types. You can find more details in the Sprint 149 release notes.

Auto-tagging in comments

Now you can more easily collaborate with your teammates on work items with the pre-population of your comments with the commentor and @mentions of the previous comment.

Automatic live updates

In the past, live updates had to be turned on for every board. To streamline this experience, we have turned on live updates for all new boards.

How can you get involved?

We have many feedback channels that help us gain visibility into your issues, and prioritize their importance our backlog. We invite you to participate and help us understand what to work on next via Developer Community.

We would love hear your feedback so that we can work on what’s most important to you! Feel free to contact me directly on Twitter at @alictai with your paper cuts.

Ali Tai Program Manager 2, Azure Boards

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