Get a board

Nine ways to end up looking at a board, from the thirty-second version to the one that spans three projects.

They differ in one thing only: how much you want to configure before you see cards. The ad-hoc Board tab needs nothing at all and is how most people meet the product. A named board takes a minute and gives you WIP limits, colors, split columns, swimlanes and a link you can put on a dashboard. Five of the pages are the cases native Azure Boards cannot cover at all: a board that spans projects, a board for work item types that never reach a backlog, a board for bugs in a team that manages bugs as tasks, one board over several teams' current sprints, and every story beneath one epic. The last two start from something you already have: the items your team's native board shows, written into a query for you, and another level of a query you already board.

Everything on these pages assumes the extension is installed. Most of them also start from a saved query, usually a Flat list of work items, with no ORDER BY or sorted by your process's order field ascending: the Board tab takes any query type, a named board also accepts a tree of work items, and the epic and team pages write their query for you. Prerequisites covers the install and the query, plus the order field an administrator may need to add.

The pages

• Put an existing query on a board: the Board tab on a query's results. No board to create, nothing to configure, and every drag writes to the work items exactly as a named board would.
• Create a named board: a saved, shared board in the hub, bound to a query and carrying its own configuration. This is the board other people will open.
• Build a board across several projects: one board over the regulatory change requests in Claims Platform, Core Insurance and Digital Banking. The short version; the full treatment is One board across several projects.
• Build a board for types that never reach a backlog: support requests, feedback, impediments and risks, none of which appear on any backlog. The full treatment is A board for types that never reach a backlog.
• Build a board for bugs when bugs are tasks: Digital Banking's Payments Incidents team manages bugs as tasks, so its defects have no board of their own. The full treatment is A board for bugs when bugs are configured as tasks.
• Build a board across several teams' sprints: Claims Intake in Sprint 41 and Regulatory Reporting in Cycle 17, one board over both teams' current work. The full treatment is One board across several teams' sprints.
• Build a board of everything under an epic: every story beneath the Payments platform epic, whichever team or project it sits in. Pick the epic; the tree query is written for you.
• Build a board that matches a team's own board: the same items your team's native board shows, as a query board: pick the team, and the scope it is using is written into the query.
• Board another level of the same query: one board, one query, and a toolbar selector that shows you the work your query found, the features that carry it, or the items it is made of.

Start with the first page if you have never seen the product; start with the second if you already know you want the board to stay.