Our team is having difficulties identifying tasks in a sprint that are open for work. We use Azure DevOps and assign our stories and tasks to a sprint iteration. Our team workflow is modeled after the DevOps Scrum template. All tasks are child work items of stories. Additionally, we set Successor and Predecessor relationships between tasks. We also set Successor and Predecessor relationships between stories. We typically break stories down into tasks small enough so we can swarm a story and get it done quicker. Identifying concurrent work is crucial for our team.
Typical Azure DevOps Sprint Taskboard
The sprint taskboard looks like a complete mess. Each story is a blob of tasks. Developers and testers have difficulty going to the sprint taskboard to find the next open task, because they need to view each task under each story to ensure the predecessors for a task are closed. I'm not sure how to interpret the taskboard view to get this same information.
Typical Work Item Relationships
Azure DevOps allows you to visualize a work item to show its immediate work item relationships. This does not provide enough context when stories have numerous tasks and the relationships between tasks are deep. Each task work item is a child of a story in addition to the predecessor/successor relationships between tasks. On top of that, we order tasks under stories as well.
To be honest, I frequently resort to creating flowcharts just like the one above. It gives a clear visual representation of an entire story from start to finish. You can clearly see areas in the workflow where we can assign work to multiple developers or testers. I just can't shake the feeling I'm missing something in DevOps...
Question:
Is there an automatic order to tasks in the Azure DevOps taskboard view that communicates the predecessor/successor relationships between tasks under a story, beyond the explicit ordering of tasks in the sprint?
Epilogue: I understand that this question will receive comments that we should break stories into smaller pieces, or that one developer should work on a story and we should plan stories that we can work on concurrently. I tried this approach with our team for years, and this is the most efficient way for us to complete work. I fought this hard for a long time, but the fact is the team does extremely well with this breakdown of work — except with identifying the next thing to work on.
The answer to your question is simply "No". You can however write a query and sort the tasks by Priority.