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Azure DevOps Services | Azure DevOps Server 2022 - Azure DevOps Server 2019
Area paths group work items by team, product, or feature area. Iteration paths group work into sprints, milestones, or other time-related periods. Both fields support hierarchical paths.
Define area and iteration paths for a project, and teams can select which paths to use for their backlog and Agile tools. Learn how Agile tools use these paths in Agile tools that rely on areas and iterations.
Note
Area paths and iteration paths are also known as Classification Nodes. You can manage them programmatically using the Classification Nodes (REST API) or the Azure DevOps CLI command az boards iteration.
Note
Area paths and iteration paths are also referred to as Classification Nodes. You can manage them programmatically via the Classification Nodes (REST API).
The areas and iterations depend on the process used to create your project. This example shows the default settings for the Scrum process. Dates aren't set by default; you need to set dates to match your sprint or release schedules.
Iterations | Areas |
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Important
If you're new to managing projects and teams, follow these steps to configure your project and teams:
Note
You can define up to 10,000 Area Paths per project and assign up to 300 Area Paths to a single team. For more information, see Work tracking, process, and project limits.
You can assign the same Area Path to more than one team, but this can cause problems if two teams claim ownership over the same set of work items. For more information, see Limitations of multi-team board views.
You can do the following actions at any time:
For more information, see Configure a hierarchy of teams.
Add areas to support your team's traceability and security requirements. Use areas to represent logical or physical components, and create child areas to represent specific features.
Add areas when you need to do any of the following tasks:
Each team can create a hierarchy of areas to organize their backlog items, user stories, requirements, tasks, and bugs.
Avoid creating an overly complex area structure. While you can use areas to partition permissions on work items, complex trees require significant overhead for permission management. Duplicating the structure and permissions in other projects can become cumbersome.
Follow these steps to configure Iteration Paths for your project and teams:
Note
You can define up to 10,000 Iteration Paths per project and assign up to 300 Iteration Paths to a single team. For more information, see Work tracking, process, and project limits.
You can do the following actions at any time:
Define as many child iterations as needed to reflect your project lifecycle. These iterations can represent various events, such as sprints, prebeta and beta phases, and other release milestones. Teams typically leave work items assigned to the team's default iteration if they aren't yet scheduled for work or release.
Add iterations to support the following requirements:
In the following example, Beta 1, Beta 2, Release 1.0, and Release 2.0 are defined for the MyApplication project.
As you create the backlog of product features and tasks, assign them to milestones based on when you expect the team to complete them. As your needs change, you can add events under each major milestone to reflect how your team schedules and manages its work.
For example, the Beta 1 iteration now contains three child nodes, one for each sprint in the Beta 1 time period.
Iterations don't enforce any rules. For example, you can assign a task to an iteration without closing or completing it during that iteration. At the end of an iteration, identify all work items that remain active or open and take appropriate action. You can move them to a different iteration or return them to the backlog.
You can run queries to find features and work items that are assigned to a specific iteration or a set of iterations and then bulk modify the work items to change their iteration paths. For more information, see Query by date or current iteration
The Area Path and Iteration Path fields, data type=TreePath, consist of multiple node items separated by the backslash (\) character. Minimize the names of nodes and make sure you conform to the following restrictions when you're adding child nodes.
Restriction type | Restriction |
---|---|
Node length | Must not contain more than 255 characters. |
Reserved names | - Must not consist only of a period . or two periods .. .- Must not be a system-reserved name, such as PRN, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, COM10, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, LPT9, NUL, CON, or AUX. For more information about reserved names, see File Names, Paths, and Namespaces. |
Special characters for nodes | - Must not contain Unicode control characters. - Must not contain any one of the following characters: \ / : * ? " < > | # $ & * + .- Must not contain characters prohibited by the local file system. For more information about Windows character restrictions, see Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces. |
Path length | Must not contain more than 4,000 Unicode characters. |
Path hierarchy depth | Must be fewer than 14 levels deep. |
Events
Mar 17, 11 PM - Mar 21, 11 PM
Join the meetup series to build scalable AI solutions based on real-world use cases with fellow developers and experts.
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