Best practices/recommendations Azure DevOps tracking which environment a story is in

Situation

We currently have over 20 development teams spread around the globe. We use Azure DevOps for our Epic, Feature, Story tracking over all the teams.

We have to move all the stories through different environments. And, we have to queue up our deployments in bunches (vs. just continuous deployment, etc.). We are maturing our practices to the point that we don't have to do this, but are very early in the process.

We'd like to be able to quickly see where various stories are at in their lifecycle to queue up for deployment. The move from Dev, to QA, to UAT, Staging, Production.

Possible Options

We have the following options...

• add custom field indicating environment
• use columns/swimlanes in the scrum/kanban boards to indicate the environment
• Tags
• Some combination of the above? Maybe Custom field and swimlanes?

Input / Thoughts Needed

Does anyone have any suggestions/thoughts on which approach they've found most helpful for large global teams?

We are favoring the custom field, but just thought it would be great to validate that thinking.

Thanks!

We are favoring the custom field, but just thought it would be great to validate that thinking.

Custom fields are great! Using this method, you can quickly find the environment for a work item (just by clicking the work item) and you can use queries to get work items for specific environments.

Click Add a custom field to a work item type (Inheritance process) for detailed steps.

If you want to visually see which work item belongs to which environment in the boards, you can add the field on the card.

Click on the Settings icon in the upper right corner -> Cards/Fields/Additional fields.

Aslo, in the boards, you can use swimlanes to better differentiate between work items in different environments.

Here is an example.

We'd like to be able to quickly see where various stories are at in their lifecycle.

You can use custom states. Here is an example, and the final result is shown in the picture above.

Click Customize the workflow (Inheritance process) for detailed information.