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Azure DevOps Services | Azure DevOps Server 2022 - Azure DevOps Server 2019
Azure DevOps provides various tools and features to help you manage change effectively and efficiently, which is a crucial part of any project. This article provides an overview for managing change and maps Agile change management tasks to the tools that Azure DevOps supports.
Several of the following sources can contribute to necessary changes in your software development projects.
Minimize unnecessary change by having the following details:
Note
Agile is a project management approach that works by breaking projects into short, iterative cycles called “sprints”. At its core, Agile is based on the assumption that circumstances change as a project develops. That’s why, in an Agile project, the planning, design, development, and testing cycles are never done. They continue to change as the project takes form.
To mitigate problems that arise from change, Agile project managers adopt many best practices. These practices are divided into the following groups: Control your process, Manage change at the product plan level, Manage your sprints, and Consider change criteria.
To support your change management process, meet both team and business objectives, minimize the number of approvals required to address changes, and assist your teams in their continual improvement processes.
Tip
Continuous improvement is a method to make sure that your processes, methods, and practices are as efficient and effective as possible.
Tip
What is Scope creep? Scope creep occurs when the deliverables or features of a project expand from what was originally defined, without a commensurate change in additional time or budget.
Ask the following questions when you consider making a change.
You have several choices for tracking change. From most lightweight to most robust, you can use one or more of the following methods:
With any of these methods, you can generate a query to list work items involve in change, and then review and triage the change with the team. How you choose to track change should align with how you and your team choose to monitor and report the scope of change.
Define a change request work item type, like the one in the following image for the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) process.
The form captures effects of the change to the following areas:
You can adopt this form or customize your own. You can also have change requests appear on your backlog along with other user stories or requirements.
Define what "done" means with acceptance criteria, which clearly describe the conditions to verify whether a requirement or bug fix is fully implemented. Typically, you want to capture these criteria within the work item. Clear acceptance criteria can help teams estimate work and develop tests to ensure the criteria has been met.
You can specify acceptance criteria for individual requirements and for sprints. Shared understanding of acceptance criteria ensures that all team members understand the scope of work.
Teams can monitor changes through work item queries, team velocity charts, and sprint burndown and release burndown charts.
With queries, you can find and triage a list of change management requests or work items tagged with a change management tag.
The team velocity chart provides several pieces of information. This chart shows how much work was planned and how much was completed. Visually, you can determine how often work was added to a sprint after the sprint began.
Another chart to review for scope creep is the sprint burndown chart. With Azure Boards, you can review the sprint burndown charts for each sprint and each team to determine the degree of scope creep introduced into each sprint.
Azure DevOps provides a robust alert system, where project members can set alerts for themselves, a team, or a project. As changes occur to work items, code reviews, source control files, and builds, you can receive email notifications.
Events
17 Mar, 11 pm - 21 Mar, 11 pm
Join the meetup series to build scalable AI solutions based on real-world use cases with fellow developers and experts.
Register nowTraining
Learning path
AZ-400: Implement continuous feedback - Training
AZ-400: Implement continuous feedback
Certification
Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert - Certifications
This certification measures your ability to accomplish the following technical tasks: Design and implement processes and communications, design and implement a source control strategy, design and implement build and release pipelines, develop a security and compliance plan, and implement an instrumentation strategy.
Documentation
Manage requirements, Agile - Azure DevOps
Learn about the tools and features available to manage requirements for Agile projects in Azure DevOps.
Default processes and process templates - Azure Boards
Learn about choosing a process or process template based on the process model you use in your Azure Boards project.
Move work items and change the work item type in Azure Boards - Azure Boards
Learn how to change the work item type or bulk move work items to another project in Azure Boards.