This weekend I had the pleasure and fortune to speak at D365 Saturday Dublin. My session focused on gathering requirements in Azure DevOps, a topic very close to my heart. Many people when thinking about Azure DevOps, associate it with the continuous integration/deployment features it provides. The purpose of my session was to highlight another valuable area of Azure DevOps, i.e. Azure Boards. If you’re new to Azure DevOps, this module is not a bad area to begin your Azure DevOps journey.
In the session, we covered:
- Benefits of using Azure DevOps
- Typical adoption challenges faced when introducing Azure DevOps into a new organisation or project.
- 5 different methods of creating requirements/user stories in Azure DevOps. For each method, I showed a video of the applicable process embedded in the below slidedeck. The methods covered were:
- Manual creation via Azure DevOps
- Import via Office Add On
- At this point I mentioned that though in the past it was possible to also create these work items via Microsoft Project, this capability has been deprecated as of Visual Studio 2019.
- D365 PSA (Project Service Automation) integration utilising the Azure DevOps Microsoft Flow connector
- PowerApp utilising Microsoft Flow and the Azure DevOps Microsoft Flow connector
- Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations LCS integration
- I shared a video sourced from the OrganicAX blog which demonstrates syncing the epics and features from the business process moduler to Azure DevOps. The process was shown in VSTS but is still applicable for Azure DevOps.
- How Azure DevOps could be used during the analysis phase of a project
- Useful reporting strategies for Azure DevOps including utilising Power BI and it’s native features such as natural language querying or ability to create reports about multiple projects utilising Azure DevOps.
The slide deck I used for this session is below. It contains the videos mentioned above (slides must be downloaded from slideshare for videos) as well as a list of useful tools and extensions that I have found useful in the past. If you are reading this and would like to know more about any of the areas I’ve mentioned, please leave a comment and I will be happy to discuss or blog more about it.
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