Hi all,
In this second part of the blog series, I want to focus in on Azure Boards and my use of it.
In short Azure Boards is where I have all my notes for the project I am currently doing. I will describe the items I use when doing projects, but I won’t get into all the things you can use Azure Boards to do. Using Azure Boards also helps out a lot when more people are working together on the same project. It will be easy to assign a task to yourself or a coworker and then mark as “Done” when the work is complete.
So let’s get into the use of Azure Boards.
On the left side of the screen, I click on “Boards” and then it will fold out and show all the options you have within Boards.
I like to go to the “Boards” section and use the “New Item” inside the canvas.
The “New item” will create a new item of the type “Issue”. Issue is the type I use the most since I see most of my work are issues. Of course, it isn’t entirely correct for all items, but it keeps my project simple to manage when I am only using the one type.
When using the boards, you have three sections, one for “To-do”, one for “Doing” and one for “Done”. When creating the new issue, it will automatically be on the “To-do” section, and this is where I start. The screenshot below shows a bunch of issues. These issues are the braindump I do before starting the project. More items will appear when I start coding because this is how I keep track of my progress and add the new ideas that come along when doing the work. If you look at the topics on my items, you will also notice that I use these items for reminding myself to read up on the technology. For me, this works out well, because otherwise, I tend to stick my head into the coding without reading the documentation beforehand.
Opening one of the items shows that I also use the description section to elaborate on what I need to do to solve this item. You can see an example of this below.
I will conclude the second part of this series, and I hope this got you inspired to start using the Azure Boards function to control your project and help you to remember all the tasks in the project.