Agile process work item types

TFS 2018

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 get created when you create a project using the Agile process and are 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

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 rollup of user stories within or across teams. For details about using Agile WITs, see Agile process work item types and workflow.

The following image shows the essential flow for getting started. For more information, see Get started with Agile tools to plan and track work.

Select 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 also modify a query using the query editor to apply different filter criteria and add queries to team dashboards.

Tips for shared queries

Manage work more effectively with the following tips:

• Find work items assigned to you by adding @Me as the value for the Assigned To field in one of the query clauses.
• 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.
• 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.
• Visualize status or progress by creating a pie-chart, column chart, or trend chart for flat-list queries.
• 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.

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

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 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.

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. Each template provides a version element. This element specifies a major and minor version.

For a summary of updates made to process templates, see Release Notes for Azure DevOps Server.

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 nonzero 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.

Related articles

• Create a project
• Add work items to manage a project
• Create a backlog
• Use a Kanban board
• Plan a sprint