Work with others

What happens when more than one person has the board open.

A board in Project boards or in a team's group is a shared object. Its definition, meaning its query, its columns, its WIP limits and its definition-of-done texts, lives once in your Azure DevOps and is the same for everyone who opens it. (A board in My boards is in your own set, and nobody else's list shows it.) So two people will eventually drag the same card in the same second, the board will change while you are talking about it, and every request the board makes is metered against the Azure DevOps consumption budget your own account is given. These three pages cover what the board does about each of those.

Pages

• Keep the board open during your daily meeting: the board refreshes itself while it sits on screen, so nobody has to press F5 mid-sentence.
• Two people move the same card: every write is checked against the version it was made from, and the later move wins and both boards agree within one refresh, and a change that cannot be applied is never silent.
• When Azure DevOps rate-limits you: the board pauses and resumes rather than looking broken.

What is shared, and what is only yours

Worth knowing before you change anything on a board someone else is watching.

Shared with everyone who opens the board, on any board outside My boards: the board's name, its backing query, its work item type, the fields shown on cards, style rules, tag colors, WIP limits, definition-of-done texts, split-column and swimlane settings, and the board's baseline: who set it, when, and what each lane held then, so everyone reads the same marks against the same plan. Editing a WIP limit straight from the column header changes it for everyone, without opening the settings panel.

Changing a shared board is offered to the person who created it and to project administrators, and on a board in a team's group to that team's administrators as well. That covers the settings panel, a WIP limit in a column header, the Level selector, Include items with no children, Move to… and deleting the board, and deleting a board deletes its baseline with it. Everyone else can read the settings, and each of those controls says who can change the board. A baseline is not covered: anyone who opens the board can set or clear it. A board in My boards is yours to change, and changing it affects nobody else. Who sees which boards has the details.

Yours alone: which columns and swimlanes you have collapsed, whether you are on the Board or List tab, whether the rollup details open on Undone or All, which board notices you have told this board not to show you again, and which board the hub reopens for you. Two people can land on different boards and see different things collapsed, on the same shared board. A colleague still sees the notice you hid, because hiding it was your answer about your own screen.