Azure Boards Kanban Tools

This provides a set of tools to enhance Kanban board usage within Azure DevOps and Azure DevOps Server.

Copy Kanban settings

With Azure DevOps, we see more and more teams switching to a single team project approach with teams being split based on a combination of iterations and areas. This can result in dozens of teams set up within the system. Once a team goes in and configures their Kanban board with their settings: card rules, swimlanes, column definitions, etc. they may want to share that setup with other teams. This extension allows teams to either grab settings from another team and apply them to their boards or to allow a team to copy their settings to another team.

Getting started

1. From the Work hub, navigate to a backlog level such as Epics, Features, or Backlog items.
2. From the backlog level, switch to the Kanban board view.
3. Click the icon to launch the Azure Boards Kanban Tools dialog by clicking on the brush icons.
4. Use options within the dialog to select the team to copy settings from or to another team.

In this release, the following configurations will be copied for each backlog level within the process template:

• Board card rules
• Board card settings
• Columns within the board
• Swimlanes

Advanced usage

When you select a team to copy settings to / from, we will need to move work items in the current Kanban board to new columns. With this extension, before you do the copy, you will have the ability to optionally configure how that mapping would be applied. Otherwise we will move work items to the first column that matches the work item's current state. To do so, click on the Customize column mappings button on the dialog.

Known issues

In this current version of the extension there are a few known limitiations and issues.

• Work item histories may be modified - If you have work items on your target board you may notice that work items may have additional history states added to them after copying indicating column or swimlane changes.
• Work items may move to a new swimlane - If you have work items spread across multiple swimlanes on your target board, those work items may be moved back to the "default" swimlane after settings are copied to that board.
• Additional backlog levels may be created - When copying settings from one team to a second team, if the team copying settings from has more backlog levels visible than the destination team, additional backlog levels will be created on the target team.
• Task level settings are not copied - The settings are only copied from any portfolio backlog levels as well as requirement backlogs. Backlogs at the task level are not supported at this time.

Learn more

The source to this extension is available. Feel free to take, fork, and extend.

Contributors

We thank the following contributor(s) for this extension: Edward Fry, Jesse Houwing, Chris Mason, Gregory Ott, Tiago Pascoal, Prasanna Ramkumar, Kees Verhaar.

Feedback

We need your feedback! Here are some ways to connect with us:

• Add a review.
• File an issue on GitHub.

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