Boards, Queries, and Charts

Azure Boards: Visualizing Work

Azure Boards offers a visual way to manage work using a Kanban-style board. It’s like a digital whiteboard where each sticky note represents a task, user story, or bug — and you can move them across columns as work progresses.

Key features of Azure Boards include:

• Drag-and-drop tasks to update their progress instantly
• Use columns like To Do, In Progress, and Done to mirror your workflow
• Set Work-In-Progress (WIP) limits to avoid team overload
• Organize tasks using swimlanes for different priorities or types of work
• Apply filters and tags to focus on what matters most

Boards are especially useful in daily stand-ups and sprint tracking — giving everyone a shared view of the team's current workload.

Queries: Custom Work Item Filtering

As your backlog grows, finding specific work items becomes tricky. That’s where Queries come in — they let you slice, dice, and filter work items based on any field you care about.

With Azure DevOps Queries, you can:

• Search for items by state, assigned user, tags, iteration, or priority
• Create saved queries for frequently used views (e.g., “My Active Bugs”)
• Use AND/OR logic to build precise filters
• Run tree or flat list queries depending on your needs
• Export results to Excel for offline reporting or sharing

Queries are especially useful for product owners, testers, and leads who need to monitor progress or gather quick insights.

Charts: Turning Data into Insights

Charts are where your work data becomes meaningful. Azure DevOps offers visual reporting to help you make informed decisions at every stage of a sprint or release cycle.

You can create charts directly from your queries or dashboards, including:

• Bar Charts – to compare counts across teams, tags, or priorities
• Pie Charts – to show proportions of work types or statuses
• Trend Lines – to show progress over time
• Burndown Charts – to track sprint completion pace
• Cumulative Flow Diagrams – to visualize bottlenecks and work in progress

Charts are perfect for sprint reviews, team retrospectives, and stakeholder updates — helping everyone stay aligned through visual insights.

Best Practices for Boards, Queries, and Charts

• Keep your board updated daily — it’s your team’s real-time status board
• Use meaningful titles and tags to make filtering easier
• Review saved queries regularly — they’re your go-to lenses on work
• Choose the right chart type for your audience: bar for breakdowns, trend for progress, pie for distribution
• Share charts on dashboards so everyone sees the same picture

Conclusion

Boards, Queries, and Charts in Azure DevOps are essential tools to help your team stay organized, informed, and focused. Whether you’re planning a sprint, analyzing workloads, or preparing reports — these tools help you turn work into visibility, and visibility into results.

Up next, we’ll explore CI/CD and Build Pipelines in Azure DevOps to automate how your code gets built, tested, and deployed.