Flow of Work Basic

Azure Boards in Azure DevOps empowers you to plan and track your projects using Agile, Basic, Scrum, or Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) processes. In this article, we focus on the Basic process to help streamline work planning, tracking, and execution.

The Basic process simplifies project management by emphasizing work items and their states. In Azure DevOps, effective project management starts with defining work item types—the essential building blocks that represent units of work and their progress. The Basic process features three key work item types: Epics, Issues, and Tasks. Each of these plays a unique role in organizing and managing your project:

• Epics: High-level work items capturing broad ideas or goals. They group related issues, allowing you to track major initiatives over several sprints or release cycles.
• Issues: Core elements that record user stories, feature requests, or bugs. Issues serve as the foundation for planning your work and grouping associated tasks.
• Tasks: Detailed, actionable work items outlining the steps needed to resolve an issue. Tasks help break down complex work into manageable pieces.

All work items progress through states such as To Do, Doing, and Done.

The diagram above demonstrates how issues are grouped into epics and further decomposed into tasks, ensuring that every small, manageable task is connected to a larger issue and that related issues are organized under an Epic.

Epics

Epics act as high-level containers for your work, enabling you to:

• Group and manage related issues.
• Gain a strategic overview of major features or goals that span multiple sprints or releases.
• Maintain clarity over broader project initiatives.

Within each Epic, you can organize a variety of issues—whether they are user stories, requirements, or bug reports. This high-level grouping facilitates strategic tracking of major goals while managing the detailed work through Issues.

Issues

Issues capture essential elements such as user stories, feature requests, or bug reports. They include:

• User Stories: Short descriptions of features from the end-user's perspective, guiding development efforts.
• Bugs: Identified problems within the software that require tracking and resolution.
• Feature Requests: Proposals for new features or enhancements to existing functionality.

By consolidating these elements, Issues form a predictable and organized planning framework. They set the stage for grouping detailed tasks under a common objective defined within an Epic.

Tasks

Tasks break down Issues into specific, actionable steps:

• They outline the individual tasks required to complete an Issue.
• Each task can be assigned to team members and tracked with its own status and deadlines.
• This breakdown enhances resource allocation, timeline management, and execution efficiency.

Organizing tasks under issues creates a clear roadmap for achieving project objectives. Decomposing complex issues into simpler tasks makes managing and executing projects more efficient.

Workflow Overview

The workflow begins by identifying and adding Issues, whether they are user stories, features, or bugs. These Issues are then grouped under Epics, which serve to organize work into strategic segments. Finally, each Issue is decomposed into precise Tasks, guiding the execution of work.

In summary, organizing work items into Epics, Issues, and Tasks in Azure DevOps leads to:

• Streamlined work item organization.
• Strategic planning from high-level goals down to detailed tasks.
• Enhanced tracking and control over project progress.

This lesson provides an overview of the basic workflow in Azure DevOps. Up next, we will review another workflow type available within Azure DevOps.