Azure DevOps (ADO) is excellent at many things, because it has so much built-in. One of ADO’s many strengths is its customizability. But you do have to pay close attention to how you engineer ADO’s configuration, and keep a close eye on the completeness and quality of the practices and data that teams are following and contributing. Here are some samples of dashboards and reports that I built in 2022 & 2023 that help you measure progress and keep track of what’s happening.
About These Dashboards & Reports
What you’ll see here are real live Azure DevOps (ADO) Dashboards and Reports that I built and used in 2022 through 2023 to allow our Scrum team and our leadership and customers, to have deep insight into our work. The only changes I made was to redact sensitive data, and so I also left out detailed lists of work that are part of these dashboard designs.
Program Increment Progress Dashboard
The Program Increment (PI) Progress dashboard is intended to be the highest level of metrics and reporting. It has multiple Burndowns that summarizes the progress of the primary goals of the work effort, and projects when the work will be completed based on progress to date. It also includes other useful and interesting metrics that provide other slices or views of the work progress.
This group uses Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Program Increments (PI) measured as quarters to management planning and execution.
Team Dashboard
The Team Dashboard is used by each team primarily to keep track of Sprint level metrics and reporting. It has multiple Sprint Burndowns that summarizes the progress of the Sprint work effort, and also projects when the work will be completed based on progress to date. It also includes other useful and interesting metrics that provide other slices or views of the work progress. For example, it includes metrics at the Story level as well as the Tasks that are children to those Stories. Stories are measured in Story Points and the Tasks are measured in hours.
Data Quality Dashboard
The Data Quality dashboard is designed to surface data problems that would negatively affect practices, the proper functioning of ADO, and the accuracy of metrics and reporting. It has multiple widgets that identify problems like:
- Work items without parents – which would cause ADO to not function properly in many ways.
- Stories and Tasks that are not estimated – which causes all metrics to not work.
- Backlog hierarchy not being correct, such as having the wrong type of parent or child work item type – which would also cause ADO to not function properly in many ways.
- In complete work items in the past.
- And more…
In the upper left corner of all dashboards is a widget that displays links to all of the important ADO project, wiki and file assets that are relevant to the current context. You can see it in the Team and Data Quality dashboards above.
For example all the dashboards, links to the Scrum board and reports, wiki pages, Confluence spaces and pages, etc. This widget is placed in the same place on all dashboards to provide easy to find and use navigation. This is especially useful because of the way ADO’s UX spreads assets all of the UX, making it difficult for anyone other than advanced ADO users, to find things. This widget is intended to solve that problem. It is also rendered in Confluence UXs as well in a similar way.
Planning Goals Wiki Page
To ensure standards are documented in central and easy to find locations, there are many pages in Confluence and the ADO wiki.
This Confluence page documents the groups Planning Goals and lays out the practices expected of teams for current and future quarters or Program Increments.
Estimating Goals and Backlog Hierarchy Levels Wiki Page
This Confluence page documents Estimating Goals and Backlog Hierarchy Levels. ADO’s work item types are very configurable and so establishing a standard that is consistent with SAFe and Scrum is essential to learning and knowledge transfer across teams.
Backlog Grooming Goals and Guidelines Wiki Page
This Confluence page documents Backlog Grooming Goals and Guidelines. It documents guidelines for how to groom backlogs, again establishing a standard that is consistent with SAFe and Scrum that is essential to learning and knowledge transfer across teams.
Backlog Reporting Standards Wiki Page
This ADO wiki page documents Backlog Reporting Standards. It documents guidelines for how to use ADO tags to facilitate quick and easy reporting of where escalations and leadership attention is needed. These ADO tags are then used in dashboard reports and other ADO features like notifications and search.
