Get started as a Stakeholder

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

Stakeholders are users with free but limited access to Azure DevOps features and functions. With Stakeholder access, you can add and modify work items, manage build and release pipelines, and view dashboards. You can check project status and provide direction, feedback, feature ideas, and business alignment to a team. For information about working with pipelines, see Build your GitHub repository and Build OSS repositories.

Stakeholders are users with free but limited access to Azure DevOps features and functions. With Stakeholder access, you can add and modify work items, view and approve pipelines, and view dashboards. You can check project status and provide direction, feedback, feature ideas, and business alignment to a team.

For more information, see the Stakeholder access quick reference. To compare Stakeholder versus Basic access, see the feature matrix.

In this tutorial, learn how to:

Prerequisites

  • You must have Stakeholder access for a private project and be a member of the Contributors or Project Administrators group. You can view boards, open and modify work items, and add child tasks to a checklist. But, you can't reorder or reparent a backlog item using drag-and-drop, nor update a field on a card.
  • You must have Stakeholder access for a public project and be a member of the Contributors or Project Administrators group to have full access to all Boards features. For more information, see Default roles and access for public projects

To get access as a Stakeholder, ask your organization owner or Project Collection Administrator to add you to a project with Stakeholder access.

To get access as a Stakeholder, ask your server administrator to add you to a security group that has Stakeholder access.

Sign in to a project

  1. Select the link provided in your email invitation or open a browser window and enter the URL for the web portal.

    https://dev.azure.com/OrganizationName/ProjectName

    http://ServerName:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection/ProjectName For example, to connect to the server named FabrikamPrime and project named Contoso, enter http://FabrikamPrime:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection/Contoso.

  2. Enter your credentials. If you can't sign in, ask the organization owner or Project Administrator to add you as a member of the project with Stakeholder access.

Understand work items and types

Work items support planning and tracking work. Each work item is based on a work item type and is assigned an identifier, which is unique within an organization or project collection.

Different work items are used to track different types of work, as described in About work items. The work item types available are based on the process used when your project was created—Agile, Basic, Scrum, or CMMI—as illustrated in the following images.

The following image shows the Agile process backlog work item hierarchy. User Stories and Tasks are used to track work, Bugs track code defects, and Epics and Features are used to group work under larger scenarios.

Conceptual image, Agile work item type.

Each team can configure how they manage Bugs—at the same level as User Stories or Tasks—by configuring the Working with bugs setting. For more information about using these work item types, see Agile process.

Open your Kanban board

You can view work items once you connect to a project.

  1. In your project, and select Boards > Boards, and then select a team board from the dropdown menu.

    Screenshot of Open your Kanban board, cloud version.

    You can also enter a keyword in the search box or select View Board directory to see a list of available team boards.

    Screenshot of Select another team's board.

    Tip

    Select the star icon to make a team board a favorite. Favorite artifacts ( favorite icon) appear at the top of the team selector list.

  2. Check that you selected Stories for Agile, Issues for Basic, Backlog items for Scrum, or Requirements for CMMI as the backlog level.

    Screenshot of menu to select product backlog level, Backlog items, Stories, or Requirements.

  1. In your project select Boards > Boards, and then select the team board from the dropdown menu.

    Screenshot of Open your Kanban board, on-premises versions.

    To select another team's board, open the selector. Then select a different team, or select the home icon Browse all team boards option. Or, you can enter a keyword in the search box to filter the list of team backlogs for the project.

    Screenshot of select another team's board, on-premises versions.

    Tip

    Select the star icon to make a team board a favorite. Favorite artifacts ( favorite icon) appear at the top of the team selector list.

  2. Check that you selected Stories for Agile, Issues for Basic, Backlog items for Scrum, or Requirements for CMMI as the backlog level. We selected Backlog Items for the Scrum process.

    Screenshot of select product backlog level, Backlog items, Stories, or Requirements, on-premises versions.

  1. In your project select Work > Backlogs > Stories, and then select Board.

    Open Portfolio Kanban board, features

    If you don't see Work, your screen size might be reduced. Select the three dots ( ) icon. Then select Work > Backlogs > Board.

    Open Work when screen size is reduced

  2. To select another team, open the project and team selector. Select a different team, or select the Browse option.

    Select another team

    Your Kanban board appears. Kanban board, Agile template

Add work items

From your board, select the plus sign, enter a title, and then select Enter.

Screenshot showing highlighted New item button.

From the Kanban board, you can't add work items, but you can open them and annotate them. To add work items, open the backlog by choosing the Backlog link. Also, you can't update the status of a work item by drag-and-drop to a different column or reorder cards within a column.

For more information, see View and add work items from the Work Items page.

Update work items

The work item forms you see may differ from the following images. The basic functionality is the same, however, changes have been made with different versions of Azure DevOps.

Change status

Drag and drop a work item to move it downstream as you complete work.

Screenshot of Kanban board, Agile template, update status of work item.

Note

Stakeholders can only drag-and-drop cards to different columns with the Azure DevOps Server 2020.1 update. For more information, see Azure DevOps Server 2020 Update 1 RC1 Release Notes, Boards.

Add details

To open a work item, double-click the title or highlight it, and then select Enter. Here we show how to assign work. You can only assign work to a user who is added to the project.

For example, here we assign the story to Raisa Pokrovskaya and we add a discussion note, at-mentioning Raisa. When you're done, select Save & Close.

Screenshot of User Story work item form, add details.

Add more details by changing field values, adding a description or tags, and adding comments. For more information, see the following articles:

View as Backlog

Check the product backlog to see how the team prioritized their work. Backlog items appear in priority order. Work item types may include bugs depending on the process used when your project was created.

From the Kanban board, choose View as Backlog.

Screenshot of link to view Backlog, cloud version.

From the Kanban board, choose View as backlog.

Screenshot of link to view Backlog, on-premises version.

From the Kanban board, choose Backlog.

Screenshot of link to view Backlog, TFDS 2018 and earlier versions.

You should see the list of backlog items listed in priority order. You can add a backlog item, which goes to the bottom of the list. With Stakeholder access, you can't reprioritize work.

Find work items

Choose Boards > Work Items > and then select an option from the dropdown menu. Here we chose Assigned to me.

Screenshot showing selections of Work, Work Items page, and Choose Assigned to Me.

For more information, see the following articles:

  1. Open Work > Queries and select Assigned to me to see the list of work items assigned to you.
    Screenshot of the queries page, items assigned to you.

    Or, open any of the queries defined in the Shared Queries folder.
    Screenshot showing running a shared query.

  2. Create new queries or edit existing queries and save them under My Queries folder.
    Screenshot showing Query Editor.

Next steps