Agile process work item types

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The Agile process supports the following work item types (WITs) to plan and track work, tests, feedback, and code review. With different WITs you can track different types of work—such as features, user stories, and tasks. These artifacts are created when you create a project using the Agile process. They're based on Agile principles and values.

Along with the WITs, teams have access to a set of work item queries to track information, analyze progress, and make decisions.

Plan and track work with Agile

You build your project plan by creating a backlog of user stories that represent the work you want to develop and ship. You track bugs, tasks, and blocking issues using the bug, task, and issue WITs. To support portfolio management, teams create features and epics to view a roll up of user stories within or across teams. For details about using Agile WITs, see Agile process work item types and workflow.

The essential flow for getting started is as shown. To get started using Scrum or Kanban tools, see Get started with Agile tools to plan and track work.

Click one of the following images to go to the linked article.

List work items by using queries

You can manage your workload more effectively by frequently reviewing the status of user stories and tasks. You can use the shared work item queries to list work items for a current sprint or the product backlog.

Descriptions of predefined queries are listed later in this article.

You can view and run queries from the web portal or from the Team Explorer plug-in to Visual Studio. You can modify a query using the query editor to apply different filter criteria. Also, you can add queries to team dashboards.

Quick tips on shared queries

If you are new to Azure Boards, work tracking, and shared queries, review these tips to learn how you can manage work more effectively:

• To find work items that are assigned to you, add @Me as the value for the Assigned To field in one of the query clauses.
• All valid users with standard access can create queries and folders under the My Queries area. To create queries and query folders under Shared Queries, you must have the Contribute permission set and have been assigned Basic access or greater. For more information, see Set permissions on queries.
• You can modify any query by adding criteria to focus on a product area, an iteration, or another field. To modify a query, open the query editor.
• You can open any query in Excel where you can update the fields of one or more work items and publish your changes to the database for tracking work items.
• You can visualize status or progress by creating a pie-chart, column chart, or trend chart for flat-list queries.

Monitor progress

All processes—Agile, Scrum, and CMMI—support building status and trend charts and dashboards. Also, several charts are automatically built based on the Agile tools you use. These charts display within the web portal.

Create light-weight charts

To get started, you can define a shared flat query and create a chart based on your tracking interests. Chart types include status—pie, bar, column, stacked bar, and pivot—and trend—stacked area, line, and area—charts.

SQL Server reports

If your project collection and the project are configured with SQL Server Analysis Services and Reporting Services, you'll have access to many Agile reports. For these reports to be useful, teams must complete certain activities, such as define build processes, link work items, and update status or remaining work.

If you need to add reporting services or update reports to the latest versions, see Add reports to a project.

SharePoint portal dashboards

You can access Agile process dashboards displayed through SharePoint. These dashboards display project data, support investigation tasks, and help teams to complete common tasks quickly. These dashboards support the display of web access parts for listing work items and reports that were built in the Analysis Services cube.

To use SharePoint dashboards, your project must have a project portal configured and the project portal must point to a SharePoint site.

Related articles

Before you start tracking work, you must have a project. To create one, see Create a project.

If you have a project, start tracking work:

• Add work items to manage a project - to gain more familiarity with the work item form features
• Create a backlog - to develop your product backlog
• Kanban - to start working in Kanban
• Plan a sprint - to start working in Scrum
• Excel.

For more information on Agile tools:

• Team assets
• Best tool to add, update, and link work items

Agile process versions

As updates are made to the Agile process template, the version number is updated. The following table provides a mapping of the versioning applied as updates are made to the Azure DevOps on-premises process templates. For Azure Boards, the latest version is always used. Starting with TFS 2012, the version element was added to the process template to support versioning of the templates. This element specifies a major and minor version. Prior to this change, the version was specified within the process template name.

For a summary of updates made to process templates, see Changes made to process templates.

Agile process predefined queries

Product backlog and feedback queries

Product owners can use the shared queries that are defined in the following table to plan and track user stories that compose the product backlog.

Iteration planning queries

The following table describes the shared queries that are listed under the Current Iteration folder. These queries find work items that are assigned to a specified iteration. As you plan more iterations, you can modify these queries to specify a different iteration and then save them to other folders that you create, such as Iteration 2 or Iteration 3.

The project administrator for each project defines area and iteration paths for that project so that the team can track progress by those designations.

Find tasks with summary values

The Work Items With Summary Values shared query, which is located in the Troubleshooting folder, lists all tasks that have child tasks and that contain non-zero values in the Remaining Work or Completed Work fields. This query is designed to find tasks that report work effort that is already accounted for in their child tasks. For the hours to be counted only once, summary tasks shouldn't be assigned any hours. For more information, see Address inaccuracies published for summary values.

Workbooks

You can use the following Excel workbooks to review open issues and to rank and assign untriaged work items. Workbooks are only available when your project has been configured with a SharePoint portal. Each workbook references a shared query.

• The Issues workbook uses the Open Issues shared query
• The Triage workbook uses the Untriaged Work Items shared query

Because these queries support workbooks, if you change these queries, it will affect those workbooks that use them.