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Improvements to Delivery Plans

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With this update, we've included multiple improvements to Delivery Plans. You can now emphasize Tags using colors and filter cards based on boolean field types. In addition, we made changes to make work item titles always visible in the card.

Check out the following feature descriptions for details.

General

Azure Boards

Azure Pipelines

General

Improved tenant switch requests reliability

Azure DevOps allows project collection administrators (PCAs) the ability to switch organization connections from one Azure AD directory to another within the Organization Settings section. Previously, customers may have experienced timeouts when trying to trigger a tenant switch, especially when the organization size was large. In such a case, a request may time out even if the job has already begun or even completed behind-the-scenes.

The newly implemented changes to the feature improve the reliability of tenant switch by running the switch task asynchronously. Even if the UI request times out or disconnects, the switch task will continue, assuring that the data will be consistently updated.

Azure Boards

Emphasize tags in Delivery Plans using colors

In Delivery Plans you can use styling rules to change cards when their corresponding work items meet rules that you set. With this update, we included Tag colors so you can now emphasize selected tags using colors.

Prior to setting tag colors, first add tags to backlog items that you want to highlight with color. From the Settings dialog, choose Tag colors and then choose the plus icon. Then, select the tag and the color you want to appear on the cards. Save the settings when you are done with your changes. Please note that only one color applies to a tag at a time.

Color tags in Delivery Plans

Filter cards based on Boolean field types in Delivery Plans

You can now filter the cards displayed based on a Boolean field type, Delivery Plans now supports the Boolean field type in the Styles and Field criteria sections of Plan settings.

Filter cards based on boolean fields

Work item title is always visible in Delivery Plan cards

A pain point for customers using Delivery Plans was that the title of the work item wasn't always visible in the cards. We heard your feedback that this made it challenging to identify the work. Based on your feedback, we've made changes so that the title of a work item is always visible in the card.

Show light green colored dependency icon for work items that have dependencies with no issues

With Delivery Plans, you can track dependencies that have been added to work items. Work items that have dependencies will have a link icon in the card. With this update, we included colors to the link icon. Dependencies that have an issue will have a red link icon, and ones that do not have an issue will have a light green link icon.

Delivery Plans work item dependencies

Azure Pipelines

macOS-latest label will soon point to macOS-11 image

macOS-11 is ready to be the default version for the macos-latest label in Microsoft-hosted agents. Until now, this label pointed to macOS-10.15 agents. This change will be rolled out over a period of several weeks beginning on September 15. We plan to complete the migration by November 3.

Azure Pipelines has supported macOS-11 for several months now. During this period, we have monitored customer feedback to improve the macOS-11 image stability and now we are ready to set it as the latest.

The macOS-11 image has a different set of software than macOS-10.15. If you use macos-latest label in your Pipelines and if your application is not written with these differences in mind, then you may experience pipeline failures. For a full list of differences between macOS-10.15 and macOS-11, visit the GitHub issue tracking this rollout. If you experience failures, change your pipeline to explicitly use macos-10.15 instead of macos-latest so that you can get more time to address your failures.

Updated schedule for removal of Ubuntu 16.04 image on Microsoft-hosted agents

In the last release notes, we communicated a schedule for the brownout of pipelines using Ubuntu 16.04 image and the eventual removal of this image. According to that schedule, we ran a first brownout on September 7th. Since ubuntu-latest image label in Azure Pipelines still pointed to ubuntu-16.04, the brownout unfortunately affected customers that did not explicitly set a pool in their pipeline or those that used ubuntu-latest. As a result, we had to halt that brownout. We have been working on addressing this issue since then.

The second brownout is now scheduled for October 11, 2021 4:00pm UTC – 10:00pm UTC. The removal of the image is planned for October 18th. Please note the updated schedule.

Next steps

Note

These features will roll out over the next two to three weeks.

Head over to Azure DevOps and take a look.

Go to Azure DevOps

How to provide feedback

We would love to hear what you think about these features. Use the help menu to report a problem or provide a suggestion.

Make a suggestion

You can also get advice and your questions answered by the community on Stack Overflow.

Thanks,

Vijay Machiraju