Developers, Project managers, stakeholders during an application modernization project are the pillars to create a real powerful APP. This in previous times to Covid was still a challenge and now even more. Are you developers disconnected?, are your teams more than teams a silo? .

There is a component quite important within Azure Devops called Boards. This component is part of your solution as you can roll out Scrum or agile approaches quite easily to your developers and stakeholders .

So within your Organization on Azure Devops, click on new project. you can choose between a private one (requires authentication and it´s focus on a team) or public (and open source development for the Linux community for example).

So when i start a project, i can choose the methodology and strategy to follow up my project and foster collaboration?

Azure Boards support several actors: user stories, tasks, bugs, features, and epics. When you create a project, you have the option to choose if you want a basic project with just Epics (the goals that you would like to achieve. Let’s say), Issues (what kind of steps should be follow or milestones) and Tasks (they are included per Issue and means the lists of points you need to execute to get the issue done) or Agile, etc. You can then assign all these items to several people and correlate those efforts on several springs.

So you can create work items to track what happens on the follow up of your development. You can coordinate and motive your team to solve delays, problems and  you would be home and dry.

On one hand, you have all the developers working remotely on this tough times and using SSO as Azure Devops is integrated with your Azure Active Directory.

On the other hand, you can invite as guest other employees or users to access your projects if they are private. Keep in mind that you can even create public projects to open software as i mentioned previously.

Let’s see how a project manager can track an application using a Scrum approach. On the Epic you will establish the goals: some business requirements or maybe an specific enhancement to the Application. To achieve that the team will work on a Feature with a bunch of Tasks to be done. Also all this effort will be tracked on boards.

So in this case of an Agile project you can use an approach like this one where you have a goal or Epic a “New Web Service Version”, you have some user´s stories like project manager or developers and obviously some issues which involves tasks to be done.

For example, create a new CI/CD process with a pipeline where you will deploy the releases on a Web App (with an slots for staging, production or development).

Also, you can see this process including the issues or the tasks associated in each sprint. You will have as much springs as needed to achieve all the goals on the final application release. To show that just check Sprints within Azure boards. Take into account you need to determine with steps or issues/ tasks should be done on each of those springs.

Finally, pay attention to identify the timeline of your springs so the project manager can detect delays and help the team to progress properly.

Adding Azure Boards to a Tab within Teams to foster the collaboration between the stakeholders bring a lot of potential as make very flexible the access, the follow up of the project and checking of every milestone.

On Teams you can add a new tab and choose Azure DevOps…

When selecting the app, you can choose the organization, project and team..

So once you have selected all, you can hit save..

Now as a project manager, you can stay on the same page with a few clicks.

In the next post we’ll show and explain more about azure repositories and azure pipelines so you can see the tremendous mechanism to accelerate the Continuous Integration for the top developers performers companies.

Enjoy the journey to the cloud with me…see you then in the next post.