Get started as a Stakeholder

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, 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 and the feature matrix.

Prerequisites

Private project:

  • You must have Stakeholder access 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.

Public project:

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.

    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 select Work > Backlogs > Stories, and then select Board.

    Screenshot of 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.

    Screenshot of 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.

    Screenshot of selection of another team.

    Your Kanban board displays.

    Screenshot of Kanban board, Agile template.

Add work items

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.

Add details

To open a work item, double-select 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 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 might include bugs depending on the process used when your project was created.

From the Kanban board, select Backlog.

Screenshot of link to view Backlog.

The list of backlog items displays 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

  1. Select Work > Queries > Assigned to me. A list of work items assigned to you displays.

    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 the My Queries folder.

    Screenshot showing Query Editor.

Next steps