agile brains

Azure DevOps for Managing Agile Projects - 2 Day

 

This Azure DevOps (ADO) training course is a hands-on immersive workshop that teaches you how to effectively manage your Agile projects with TFS using ADO. Azure DevOps is a bundle of services to help developers ship high-quality producers faster. It includes CI/CD pipelines (Azure Pipelines), visual reporting tools (Azure Boards), and code repositories (Azure Repos) for code management and version control. Align your core Agile principles and ceremonies with one of the most popular Agile project management tools developed by Microsoft Team. It can be used to manage and track your Agile requirements, defects, issues, products, projects and reports all within a single tool.

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Whether you are a team leader, Agile manager, Scrum Master or Product Owner, this course will help you understand the core functionality of Azure DevOps, and allow you to customize the tool to your organization’s software development processes and methodology. DevOps to track work, share code, and host, build, and deploy software in the cloud. The course allows you to utilize Azure DevOps from a project management perspective that incorporates agile methodologies like scrum and Kanban – we will evaluate the different add-ons available so it works best for your team, by adding extensions and integrating productivity tools such as Slack and Office. The course covers how to create projects, create and track tasks, report and resolve issues. We’ll discuss the key screens, fields, and tools within Azure DevOps and common plugins.

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We’ll discuss how ADO fits into an Agile team context and integrates with its ceremonies, and how various team members will interact with JIRA during the course of their work. We have a sample project about creating a website for customers to order meals from our enterprise.

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Learning Objectives:

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• Use Azure DevOps to intake and manage Agile projects effectively

• Create Agile projects and manage your team members using ADO

• Customize ASO for your project and program management needs

• Manage your user stories / requirements / issues and their lifecycle using workflows

• Configure work items, backlogs, sprints, boards and reports to map your SDLC

• Run your Agile software development process and ceremonies within ADO

• Set up sprints and mange Scrum / Kanban boards as part of your delivery process

• Handle status updates using customized queries and filters

• Measure and monitor team, product, and release progress using off-the-shelf and customized reports

• Identify how Azure DevOps can be used in your organization to manage and track work

 

Outline:

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• Azure DevOps Interface – an Overview

  • Navigation basics and different project views (overview, board, work items, backlogs, queries, calendar and sprints)

  • Cross-referencing tickets using Links

  • Link Types for related work and continuous integration

  • Adding and updating links for parent and child relationship (hands-on exercise)

• Prioritization and Estimation within Azure DevOps

  • Challenges of estimation with hours

  • Estimating work using relative estimation with story points

  • Assigning user stories to users and sprints (hands-on exercise)

• Azure DevOps Work Items Types

  • Updating story, issue, feature, initiative, subtasks

  • Layout of tickets

  • Customizing layout of work items (hands-on exercise)

• Introducing Agile and Scrum

  • Overview of Agile and Scrum

  • Adding team members to your project (hands-on exercise)

  • Capacity – team members’ capacity (hands-on exercise)

  • Adding working days within Azure DevOps

  • Identifying states of delivery for backlog items (hands-on exercise)

• Managing Scrum Projects

  • Managing boards (backlog refinement, sprint planning and review)

  • Exploring boards and project relationship

  • Improving productivity through day-to-day use

  • Managing backlog items including stories, bugs and tasks (hands-on exercise)

  • Labeling and tagging components (hands-on exercise)

• Optimizing search techniques

  • Refining user stories

  • Adding acceptance criterion to stories (hands-on exercise)

  • Filing effective defects (hands-on exercise)

  • Starting, managing and closing sprints (hands-on exercise)

  • Leveraging reports

  • Action items on reports during retrospective and review

  • Creating burn-down, sprint and velocity charts (hands-on exercise)

• Customizing and Advanced Reporting using Queries

  • Creating custom reports with fields, operators and conditions (hands-on exercise)

  • Developing a custom search query and saving it (hands-on exercise)

  • Utilizing charts based on saved queries (hands-on exercise)

  • Email Query, saving results, exporting to Excel (hands-on exercise)

• Open Space

  • Retrospective

  • Feedback and use within your organization

• Managing Add-Ons

  • Introducing Retrospectives and Slack

  • Installing third party add-ons

• Dashboards for Effective Reporting

  • Introducing and using Dashboards

  • Plotting variables including work-items, start and end date

  • Coordinating multiple projects and search

  • Managing releases and burn-down charts for reporting

  • Creating and re-using visually appealing dashboards (hands-on exercise)

  • Using different gadgets within Dashboards (hands-on exercise)

• Applying Azure DevOps to non-software projects

  • Using Azure DevOps to manage work for other parts of organization

  • Extending to Kanban projects

  • Customizing reporting and time tracking (hands-on exercise)

• Managing Projects with Kanban

  • Setting up Kanban limits (hands-on exercise)

  • Creating Kanban boards (hands-on exercise)

  • Organizing data with swim lanes and custom columns (hands-on exercise)

  • Tracking progress

  • Optimizing work in progress

  • Interpreting cumulative flow and control charts

• DevOps within Azure DevOps for Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery

  • Chartering the DevOps journey for your delivery needs

  • Introducing CI/CD for your project

  • Setting up Repos (instructor demo)

  • Introducing Pipelines and test plans for testing needs

  • Integrating with GitSense for Continuous integration (instructor demo)

• Open Space

  • Feedback and collaborative discussion

  • Next steps in your Azure DevOps implementation