When I look at delivery processes that don’t succeed, it’s not because they don’t follow Agile or that they are Waterfall or that Kanban doesn’t scale – it’s that they aren’t tracking the right items.

I was doing a workshop a number of years ago before kicking off a big project on what kind of software delivery we wanted to do, what we needed to measure, how each group worked, and how we wanted to achieve it.

After 3 workshop sessions, it turns out that what would be tracked in our Azure DevOps system would not give our delivery teams the knowledge as to how and what they were doing. There were tenets in Agile that were good that we wanted to follow, but apart from that, we need a little more context to be able to explain things correctly to our business teams.

Enter the world of Azure DevOps Customizations of Work Items. This probably seems like a basic topic, but sometimes the most basic topics are the ones that are most important to understand. Azure DevOps customization is the definition of rapid deployment, allowing you to easily get new work items up and running, test them out, and get immediate feedback.

The best part, it takes all of ten minutes, with no programming knowledge required.

Find the Process you want to Customize

The first thing you need to do is navigate to your Organization, click Settings, and then select “Boards” and “Process.” From there, you will select your process that you want to modify.

Creating a new Work Item Type is as easy as selecting “Create New Work Item Type”, giving it a name, and some customization details as to what you want your New Work Item Type to be.

At this point, you have a new work item created with fairly basic fields that is now usable within your system.

Note: When I say usable, the new work item is definitely usable. If you are testing things out, do them in a locked-down process not viewed by others in advance (in case you have people itching to try out new things.

When creating or customizing a work item type, you will always have the same three fields across the top – Layouts, States, and Rules.

Adding Fields, States, and Rules

When adding fields, you can use the “New field” button on the Layout Designer to add existing fields already created and/or create your own.

You can read up on past posts on Field and State Customization.

Where does my Work Item appear?

Jira is a great tool for customization of software, but can be a bit daunting your first time through. However, with Azure DevOps, your work items are automatically integrated into the work item engine of Auzure DevOps.

The Finished Product

The following took me about 10 – 15 minutes create. In all honesty, the majority of your time is spent on getting everyone on the same page as to what is being created rather than doing the actual creation itself.

And generally, that was the point in writing this blog – if you’re using Azure DevOps, it’s built to be designed, integrated, and streamlined into your delivery operations. All teams involved in building your software should have access to what is being built and not have to use their headspace trying to translate what things were and what they were not on the fly.

Keep it simple, get everyone on the same page, and get your team focused on what they should be doing – building great software – not figuring out who is doing what and where are they.