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Azure Boards configuration and customization FAQs

TFS 2018

You have many options to configure and customize an Azure Boards project. If you are new to this subject, see Azure Boards Configuration and Customization. Here, you'll find answers to frequently asked questions when configuring or customizing Azure Boards. For FAQs specific to using Azure Boards or working with queries, see Azure Boards FAQs and Query FAQs.

General

Can sub hubs within Azure Boards be disabled?

No. While you can disable an entire service— such as Azure Boards, Azure Repos, Azure Pipelines— you can't disable individual pages within a service. To learn more, see Turn a service on or off.

Are there set limits regarding configuration or customization?

There are a number of limits Azure DevOps imposes such as the number of Area Paths and Iteration Paths you can define for a project, the number of processes you can define, and more. For a full list, see Work tracking, process, and project limits.

Configuration

Who has permissions to configure Azure Boards?

In general, you need to be a member of the Project Administrators group to configure the following project-level objects. Or, you can provide permissions at the node level or object level to individual members or groups. To learn more, see Change project-level permissions.

To grant permissions to an individual member or group to perform the following tasks, you must set the corresponding project-level permissions to Allow. See Change project-level permissions.

In general, you need to be a member of a team or granted the Team Administrator role to configure the following team-level objects.

Customization

Who has permissions to customize Azure Boards?

To modify an On-premises XML process, you need to be a member of the Project Collection Administrators group to manage process templates or the Project Administrators group to exercise a witadmin commmand. Or, you must have the following explicit collection-level permissions set to Allow:

Is there a way to determine who changed what within a process?

A best practice is to maintain process templates under source control. In that way, changes made to a process is available through standard source control versioning.

How do I change the picklist of values?

Picklist value entries are dependent on the data type. Refer to the following articles based on the field type of interest:

Can I add or rename a portfolio backlog?

Yes. You can add up to a total of five portfolio backlogs. And, you can rename a portfolio backlog and add custom work item types to a portfolio backlog.

To learn how, see Customize your backlogs or boards (Inheritance process) or Add a portfolio backlog level (On-premises XML process).

How do I add my custom work item type to a backlog?

Modify your requirement backlog to include the custom work item type on the product backlog. For details, see Customize your backlogs or boards, Edit or rename the requirement backlog.

Note

The backlog level to which you add a custom work item type determines the parent work item type(s) for the work item type.

Can caching impact rules applied to work items?

Yes. Conditional rules based on user or group membership are cached for your web browser. If you find yourself restricted to update a work item, you may have encountered one of these rules. If you believe you've encountered an issue that doesn't apply to you, see Work item form IndexDB caching issues. To learn more about conditional rules, see Rules and rule evaluation.

Can I upload my own custom work item type icons for an Inherited process?

Example request: When I create a new work item type, I get an option to choose an icon. The icon set is limited and doesn't support the icons that we would prefer for our use case. Is there a way to associate custom icon to new work item type?

No. Uploading your custom icons isn't a supported feature at this time.