Remove, delete, or restore work items in Azure Boards
Azure DevOps Services | Azure DevOps Server 2020 | Azure DevOps Server 2019 | TFS 2018 - TFS 2013
Work items can live forever in your work tracking data store. You never have to delete them. However, you might want to set up a work item management process for one of the following actions:
- Change state: Remove work items from appearing on backlogs and boards by changing the work item State to Remove or Cut.
- Destroy: Permanently delete work items, deleting all data from the work tracking data store.
The ability to archive work items or projects isn't a supported feature at this time.
To remove, modify, or delete work items, you must be a member of the Contributors group or have the following permissions set to Allow.
- Remove work items: Have the View work items in this node and Edit work items in this node Area Path permissions set to Allow.
To Destroy work items (witadmin CLI), you must be a member of the Project Administrators group or have the Delete work items in this project project-level permission set to Allow.
Note
By default, for TFS 2015.1 and earlier versions, the Contributors group has Delete work items in this project set to Not set. This setting causes the Contributors group to inherit the value from the closest parent that has it explicitly set.
For a simplified view of permissions assigned to built-in groups, see Permissions and access.
By changing the State of a work item to Removed, you effectively remove it from a backlog or board view (product, portfolio, and sprint backlogs, Kanban board, and Taskboards). The Removed state corresponds to the Removed workflow category state. If you define custom workflow states, any state you map to the Removed workflow category state will act in a similar way.
To cause removed items to not show up in queries, you must add a clause that filters on the State field.
Use the witadmin destroywi command to permanently remove work items from the data store. A permanent delete means all information in the work tracking data store is deleted and cannot be restored nor reactivated.
Note
Deleting work items from the witadmin command line is deprecated for TFS 2018.2 and later versions, and not supported for Azure Boards cloud service.
Open a Command Prompt window where the latest version of Visual Studio is installed and change the directory to where the witadmin.exe tool has been installed.
For example, you would change to the following directory for TFS 2013. (For other versions, see Remove work items permanently (witadmin destroywi)).
cd %programfiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE