Azure Boards Summer Update

Dan Hellem

Over these last few months, our team has been working hard at delivering new value in Azure Boards. We would like to take a moment to highlight some of the most recently released features. Be sure to check out the Features Timeline for updates and our product roadmap.

New Boards Hub

Modernizing the user experience for the Azure Boards Hubs has been a significant and important investment for Azure Boards. The product has been re-platformed to provide a faster user interface, consistency with other parts of the product, and improved accessibility. We announced the 2nd preview wave in sprint 202 and have been working hard on fixing bugs and addressing feedback. If you have not yet turned on the preview, please do. We are hoping to GA the New Boards Hub in late summer or early fall. Let us know if you have any issues or problems by emailing me directly.

Move to column position on kanban board *

Re-order the work items on a Kanban board column by using Move to position. This will make ordering easy for columns that contain a lot of work items.

Image of boards move to colum position

Query by parent

This has been a long time ask from customers who are looking for a way to get a flat list of children based on the parent (or no parent) work item.

Image boards query by parent

Work item attachments from history

We fixed a small issue where users were able to download attachments from the work item history, even after the attachment was removed from the form. Now, once the attachment is removed, it cannot be downloaded from the history, nor will the download URL be available from the REST API response.

Improved “Show more items” UX *

When a filter is applied and you click the Show more items button, the system will use the filter to generate and execute a more specific Work Item Query Language (WIQL) query. This should eliminate the need to click the Show more items button more than once.

image of show more items

Assigned To children in kanban cards *

The Assigned To avatar now appears on all child items of a card on the kanban board.

Image of assigned to avatar on cards

Filter on work item history *

Work item history tab now allows filtering. You can narrow down and see the revisions made to individual fields by specific people.

Image of work item history filter

Delivery Plans, Dependencies toggle

We improved the dependency tracking experience in Delivery Plans by allowing you to see all the dependencies lines across all the work items on the screen.

Image of delivery plans dependency toggle

Delivery Plans, Last Accessed column

Last accessed column has been added to the Delivery Plans directory page. This provides visibility on when a Delivery Plan was last opened and looked at. Making it is easy to identify the plans that are no longer used so they can be deleted.

Image of last access column

Work item revision limits for REST API’s

Over the past few years, we have seen organizations with automated tools generate tens of thousands of work item revisions. This creates issues with performance and usability on the work item form and the reporting REST APIs. To mitigate the issue, we have implemented a work item revision limit of 10,000 to the Azure DevOps Service. The limit only affects updates using the REST API, not the work item form.

Click here to learn more about the revision limit and how to handle it in your automated tooling.

Summary

That is the list of new features delivered so far this summer. Some of these items are part of the latest deployment and may take a week or more to reach your organization. We have a lot more planned! Make sure you keep an eye on the Features Timeline to track our plans for Boards and the rest of Azure DevOps.

* these features are only available in the new boards hub

12 comments

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  • Michael Taylor 0

    I did try the beta a while back and found that it didn’t render correctly for us. I reported the issue and after several weeks of review I was told it was because we didn’t follow some arbitrary backlog work item type that the new UI requires and that isn’t actually agile but was said to be “standard”. There was no intention of fixing this and that I would need to go through the 20K+ work items that are potentially impacted (even those that are already closed) and “fix” them.

    I immediately turned off the preview and never went back. If the GA version breaks our backlog again then we’ll not be able to use Azure DevOps for work item tracking and will migrate our system to something else. Perhaps your team will actually stop using the rationale of “by design” or “not standard” and actually get your years old tool to work with years old projects. Excuses don’t help solve your problem and there are other solutions out there if we’re going to waste our time “fixing” our backlog.

    • Dan HellemMicrosoft employee 0

      Hello Michael, if you can please email me the details we will take a look. If it works in the current boards, it should work in the new boards. No excuses 🙂

      • Michael Taylor 0

        I’ve reenabled the preview and I don’t see the issue right now so maybe it has been fixed after all. However it is dependent upon the items being displayed. Here’s a link to the original issue. I’ll email you if I start seeing the issue again. Thank you.

        • Dan HellemMicrosoft employee 0

          Okay great. You have my email so please reach out if you have any other issues. Glad it is working now for you.

  • Baker, Brian 0

    Something I just noticed in the last couple of days is that when I try to move a work item to a new column and there is a rule error (e.g. a required field needs a value set), the board no longer leaves it in place with the “error” text on the bottom of the card. Instead, the card jumps back to the original column. I’m not sure if this is due to a change by our admins or possibly something new with the preview.

    • Dan HellemMicrosoft employee 0

      Hello Brian, can you email me a screen shot of what is going so we can take a look? The new boards hub should not be messing with your rules. You can also turn off the preview and use the old boards hub and compare behaviors. If it works in old and no longer in new, we have a problem to go fix. Please email details if you think you have a problem.

  • Rob Gourdie 0

    Hi Dan – in Delivery Plans can you simultaneously show two timescales? We are a Scaled Agile org and plan work into our sprints (Iterations), but keep our planned work and Epics at the Planning Increment (Iteration Path) level.
    eg.
    Epic ‘Blah’ is in /PI 12 along with Feature ‘Blah 3’ etc.
    Committed Features [Blah 1] is in iteration “12.1” aka /PI 12/12.2.

    The downside is that because we are only using the iteration/sprint timescale in Delivery Plans, items at the Planning Increment level are not shown, and we need to place all our work at the ‘12.1’ sprint level which mucks with our SaFE processes in ADO.

    • Dan HellemMicrosoft employee 0

      No, it does not support two different time scales 😞. This is something we are looking into.

      You can use target and start date for your higher order work items and then use sprints from execution of stories.

  • Rob Gourdie 0

    Sorry another question Dan – Again in Delivery Plans I can’t seem to show the parent<>child relationship, and I need to double do entry to show a child as a child and as a dependency.
    Should we be able to see child <> parent relationships in Delivery Plans? When we have a large busy program of work it allows us to do visual planning when we can see the parent child relationships.

    • Dan HellemMicrosoft employee 0

      You can add the different backlog levels and then use the filter (make sure tree is selected) by parent option. This will show you the full child-parent-grand parent relationship, depending on what your filter selection is.

  • Anubhavi Mulga 0

    Thank you for this useful information.
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