Manage Scrum process template objects

Azure DevOps Services | Azure DevOps Server 2022 - Azure DevOps Server 2019

The Scrum 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 product backlog items, tasks, bugs, and more. These objects get created when you create a project using the Scrum process. They're based on Scrum 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.

Note

• You can customize the work tracking system for your project by creating and customizing an inherited process and applying that process to your project. For more information, see Inheritance process model.
• You can also customize a process template. For more information, see About processes and process templates.

Plan and track work with Scrum processes

You build your project plan by creating a backlog of work items that represent the features, requirements, user stories, or other work to do. You track bugs, tasks, and blocking issues using the bug, task, and impediment WITs. To support portfolio management, teams create features and epics to view a rollup of their product backlog items within or across teams. For more information, see Scrum 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.

Note

A work item is a database record that contains the definition, assignment, priority, and state of work. Work item types define the template of fields, workflow, and form for each type. Work items can be linked to each other to support tracking dependencies, roll up of work, and reports.

For more information, see Scrum work item types and workflow.

List work items

Define work item queries to list work items for a current sprint or the product backlog.

Note

When you create a new project, there's no longer a default set of Shared Queries. The definitions for Shared Queries were removed from the process template. For on-premises deployments, you can add them to a custom process template as described in Add work item queries to a process template.

View and run queries from the web portal or from the Team Explorer plug-in for Visual Studio. Modify a query using the query editor to apply different filter criteria and add queries to team dashboards.

Tips for shared queries

Enhance your workflow using the following tips:

• Add @Me as the value for the Assigned To field in a query clause to find work items assigned to you.
• Open the query editor to modify any query by adding criteria for a product area, iteration, or another field.
• Open a query in Excel to update fields of one or more work items and publish changes to the database.
• Create a pie-chart, column chart, or trend chart to visualize status or progress for flat-list queries.
• Create queries and folders under the My Queries area with standard access. To create queries and folders under Shared Queries, ensure you have the Contribute permission and at least Basic access. For more information, see Set permissions on queries.

Monitor work 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.

Analytics widgets and Power BI reports

The Analytics Service can answer quantitative questions about the past or present state of your projects. You can add Analytics widgets to a dashboard or use Power BI to create charts and reports.

For more information, see What is the Analytics Service?

Scrum process versions

As updates get made to the Scrum process template, the version number gets updated. The following table provides a mapping of the versioning applied as updates get made to the Azure DevOps on-premises process templates. For Azure Boards, the latest version always gets used. Each template provides a version element, which specifies a major and minor version.

Version	Scrum process name	Major version
Azure DevOps Services Azure DevOps Server 2022	Scrum	18
Azure DevOps Server 2020 Azure DevOps Server 2019	Scrum	17
TFS 2018	Scrum	16

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

Related articles

• Create a project
• Add work items to manage a project
• Create a backlog
• Manage access to specific features
• Learn about default permissions and access levels for Azure Boards