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