0
votes

Azure DevOps sprint boards (Boards -> Sprints) show work items grouped either by "People" or by "Stories", none of which make much sense to me, given how my team works on items based on client's very short lived "sprints". We work in sprints of one week, so User story doesn't make ton of sense to us. Also grouping by "People" does not work for us because we work on items based on their priorities (up the board means higher priority). So grouping items based on people defies (well, at least to a great extent) the idea of "up the board means higher priority", because multiple items are assigned to each developer, and low priority items show up in between high priority items of two users. Take a look at the image below. This is not from my actual project, and I have marked in the image with HIGH and LOW to indicate priorities.

azure-devops-sprint-board

For two users, things are not that complicated, but for many users things start to get a little confusing.

Question: Can I prevent the board from grouping items by either "People" or "Stories"? I don't want any grouping, I want something like the Kanban board in Azure DevOps (Boards -> Boards). I haven't found any straight forward setting to do this. And since in Azure DevOps, things are not so easy when it comes to customization.

2
I've worked on user stories in sprints of one week. Maybe your user stories are too big? - Daniel Mann
@Daniel In fact we don't even have/practise the concept of user stories in our projects. Heck, I don't even think I know exactly what user stories are supposed to represent. Bottom line, we don't have any work item of type user story, so they are no use to us. Thanks for your comment BTW. - Sнаđошƒаӽ
Then just create tasks. Tasks will show up on the sprint board as unparented. - Daniel Mann
@DanielMann But I don't want to see any grouping at all, not even that "unparented" thing. I suppose that's impossible. :( - Sнаđошƒаӽ

2 Answers

2
votes

Can I prevent the board from grouping items by either "People" or "Stories"?

Agree with you.

I am afraid there is no such way to prevent the board from grouping items by either "People" or "Stories". This behavior is by design. There is no way to fix it at present.

You could add your request for this feature on our UserVoice site (https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/idea/post.html?space=21 ), which is our main forum for product suggestions. Thank you for helping us build a better Azure DevOps.

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0
votes

Just had the same question/problem...

My workaround: Use the Kanban board (which allows for the stories to transition through the columns without grouping) and set a filter to the current iteration.

Will see if there are any drawbacks here but seems to do the trick for now.