Azure Boards configuration and customization FAQs

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.

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.

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.

• Area Paths
• Modify work items under an area path
• Iteration Paths
• Shared Queries and Shared Query folders

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.

• Create tag definition
• Delete and restore work items
• Permanently delete work items

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

• Default and selected Area Paths
• Default and selected Iteration Paths
• Define work item templates

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:

• Delete field
• Manage process template To grant a project member permissions, see Change project collection-level permissions.

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.

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

• Numeric or string picklist fields: You can customize the menu values for fields such as Priority, Activity, Discipline, and so on. See Add and manage fields (Inherited process) or Add or modify a field, customize a picklist (On-premises XML process).
• Area Path or Iteration Path: These tree-path fields are configured for each project. To learn more, see About area and iteration (sprint) paths.
• Person-name or Identity fields: To add values for fields associated with user accounts such as Assigned To, add users to a project security group or a team. By default, the list for these fields contain the account names for all users and groups that have been added to your organization or on-premises collection. These accounts are often synchronized with Active Directory or Microsoft Entra ID. See Add Active Directory / Microsoft Entra users or groups to a built-in security group.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Related articles

• Azure Boards Configuration and Customization
• Azure Boards FAQs
• Work tracking, process, and project limits
• Azure Boards extensions
• About teams and Agile tools