Configure projects and teams in Azure DevOps
In today's highly dynamic software development landscape, efficient project organization and team collaboration are essential components of DevOps strategy. Projects and teams in Azure DevOps form the foundation for efficient communication, clear accountability, and streamlined workflow management. They also contribute towards enhanced agility, accelerated delivery, and proper alignment with business objectives.
Planning
To build the optimal approach to implementing projects and teams, you should first analyze the organizational structure, its operational model, and the roles that contribute to the development lifecycle. This analysis should consider such factors as departmental divisions, current business initiatives, and any existing projects that might introduce potential cross-project dependencies.
Next, for each new project, determine its scope, objectives, and stakeholders. Based on the organizational model and project requirements, identify the optimal way to structure the project's teams. Decide whether teams will be cross-functional or organized based on such criteria as features and components. Identify the roles and responsibilities within the project teams. Common roles include developers, testers, product owners, Scrum masters, and project managers. Clearly define the expectations and responsibilities associated with each role. Ensure sufficient techniques and methods for collaboration and communication within and between teams.
Establish governance policies and guidelines for project management, including version control policies, branching strategies, code review processes, and verification of compliance requirements. Define the agile processes and methodologies that will be used for project management. Keep in mind that you can customize the Agile tools in Azure DevOps to support your decision.
To streamline the process of creating new projects, consider defining templates or blueprints that define project structure, processes, and artifacts. Such templates might include predefined settings of source code repositories, work item tracking, pipelines, and test plans.
Implementation
Once you complete all the preparations, proceed with implementing the planned project. At the very outset, you need to specify the project's visibility (public or private), decide between the Git and Team Foundation Version Control as the version control mechanism, and choose the work item process. That choice includes the following options:
- Agile: Focuses on iterative development and delivering customer value through user stories, backlogs, sprints, and visual boards for tracking progress.
- Basic: Offers a simple and flexible approach with generic work items and basic backlog and board functionalities, most suitable for small teams or projects.
- CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration): Provides formalized processes and standards for managing work items, requirements, and quality assurance, which is most suitable for organizations seeking process improvement and compliance.
- Scrum: Employs an iterative, self-organizing framework with product and sprint backlogs, daily stand-ups, and artifacts for managing work and delivering incremental changes.
- Customized Scrum: Facilitates tailoring of the Scrum process to fit specific needs through flexibility in work item types, fields, and workflow states.
With the project in place, you can proceed to building its team structure. By default, every project includes one team which name is derived from the project name, so, depending on the outcome of your planning, you might need to modify it. You might also want to create additional teams. Each team must have at least one administrator. Each team administrator can add team members.
When creating a team, it is also possible to automatically generate an area path with the matching name. Area paths help organize work items within a project, facilitating better visibility, reporting, and access control. Associating individual teams with a dedicated area path helps clearly delineate between their areas of responsibility.
Once the teams are created, you can configure for each of them a wide range of additional settings, including customized permissions. By default, team members are added to the Contributors group on the project level. At this point, you can also start managing project resources such as repositories, boards, pipelines, and test plans and assign them to specific teams as required.
In the spirit of continuous improvement, you should regularly review and refine the project and team configuration based on feedback from teams' and project's members. This will ensure that your organization can efficiently manage the process of developing software products regardless of their complexity.