Loading Task Boards in ActionableAgile

This document explains how you can load your Task Board into ActionableAgile for Azure DevOps.

Task Boards are located in the Sprint area of your Azure project.

A common way to use Task Boards is to create Tasks for a story in the leftmost column. The Story will remain there until all the Tasks for it are completed, at which point it will be moved to Done.

In ActionableAgile, the journey of your work items is plotted through transition dates. These transition dates are grabbed from when you move an item from one state or column to another.

If you want to track Stories and the Story sits in the left-most column until all its Tasks are completed and then moves straight to Done, you will not get very granular metrics from ActionableAgile, as the wrong work item is being tracked. You’ll need to track the Task, as this will show more granularity.

Adding a unique label to each Story Task will allow you to visually differentiate them in ActionableAgile by filtering and adding a colour.

If your task board is set up with the statuses named after the columns, you can visualise the task board in ActionableAgile.

To load your task board in ActionableAgile, navigate to the data set drop-down menu and select Load Azure Data.

Select to pull from the Work Item History. You cannot pull from board history as the task board isn’t the same as a regular board in Azure dev ops and thus cannot be loaded in ActionableAgile. Loading via Work Item History will pull all of the items in your project into the data set.

Loading via Work Item History will, by default, pull every work item in your project into the data set. You can use filters to refine which data is loaded. In Step One, you can use Created After or Resolved After to refine the data loaded.

If you have created a specific label to add to each Story’s Task, make sure to add it in the second step of the data set creation process.

Unless the Task Board is the only Board you use in Azure Dev Ops, your columns and states will likely be out of order in the mapping stage. Map them to mimic your task board, and make sure your states are mapped to the correct column. If a column or state has not yet been used, it will not appear in the mapping stage as it contains no data.

This is why it is important for states to have unique names, so they can be mapped and visualised in ActionableAgile. If all active states on your task board have the same name, they will appear as one in the mapping stage. If you only have one in progress state, this is fine, but if you have multiple, it will be impossible to see the tickets' journey through each stage as the data exists in one data point and can’t be separated.

You may have many states that do not belong to your Task Board, as we’ve loaded them via Work Item History. Thus, all the states from all work items in this project have been loaded. If you only plan to filter out items apart from the ones on your Task Board, these can be left unmapped; otherwise, they should be mapped to where they would sit in your workflow.

You can read more about Task Boards in Azure DevOps here:

Customize a sprint taskboard in Azure Boards - Azure Boards

How workflow category states are used in Azure Boards backlogs and boards - Azure Boards