Manage your Scrum process template artifacts

Azure DevOps Services | Azure DevOps Server 2022 - Azure DevOps Server 2019 | TFS 2018

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 artifacts are 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. To learn more, see Inheritance process model.

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 roll up of their product backlog items within or across teams. For details about using Scrum WITs, see Scrum 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.

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.

Scrum work item types and workflow provides more details about using these WITs.

List work items

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

Note

New projects no longer define a default set of Shared Queries at the time of project creation. The definitions for Shared Queries have been 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.

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.

Important

Starting with Visual Studio 2019, the Azure DevOps plug-in for Office has deprecated support for Microsoft Project. Project integration and the TFSFieldMapping command is not supported for Azure DevOps Server 2019 and later versions, including Azure DevOps Services. You can continue to use Microsoft Excel.

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

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.

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.

To learn more, see What is the Analytics Service?

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
• Use a Kanban board - 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

Scrum process versions

As updates are made to the Scrum 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.

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.