Exclude & Include Work Item Types in Azure DevOps Projects

As we all know that Azure DevOps services supports four process flow or process templates. Anytime you create a project, you must choose a process or process template based on the process model selected for your organization or collection. Below are standard processes template you can choose. You can refer Microsoft documentation for more details. I came across a business scenrio where customer want to exclude and include some work item types (e.g. Task, Issue). Azure DevOps does not allow us to change the base process template directly. So to customize any process template, we need to first create an inherited process template and make or apply our desired change there. In this article we will go through step-by-step and create our own customized template.

Basic - Choose Basic when your team wants the simplest model that uses Issues, Tasks, and Epics to track work. Here Tasks support tracking Remaining Work.

Agile - Choose Agile when your team uses Agile planning methods, including Scrum, and tracks development and test activities separately. This process works great if you want to track user stories and (optionally) bugs on the Kanban board, or track bugs and tasks on the taskboard. Here Tasks support tracking Original Estimate, Remaining Work, and Completed Work.

Scrum - Choose Scrum when your team practices Scrum. This process works great if you want to track product backlog items (PBIs) and bugs on the Kanban board, or break down PBIs and bugs into tasks on the taskboard. Here Tasks support tracking remaining work only.

CMMI - Choose CMMI when your team follows more formal project methods that require a framework for process improvement and an auditable record of decisions. With this process, you can track requirements, change requests, risks, and reviews. Here Tasks support tracking Original Estimate, Remaining Work, and Completed Work.

We can exclude Work Item types in Azure DevOps projects by enabling or disabling them based on the business need. For any Azure DevOps Project. You can keep only work item types which makes sense for your project, and rest you can exclude from the project by hiding them. We choose project templates such as Agile, Scrum, Basic, CMMI or any other custom template during the creation of the Azure DevOps Project. Each Project template type has its own work item types or even we can add our own custom type.

As all the inherited process templates hold all the base process work items, you may want to disable some of them which are not required for your project types.

Steps to enable or disable work item types in Azure DevOps

From the DevOps Organization settings, navigate to the Process section, and choose “Create inherited Process” to create the inherited process (as shown in below screenshot).

I just specified a sample name of called “My-Agile” in this example

Once you have a template created, you can view the existing work item types or even create new work item types. In my example I want to disable the “Issue” category.

We can also create our own Work Item type, in my case I want to create a work item type called “Proof Of Concept” and add three new fields there called “Technologies, Objective & Success Criteria” (as shown in below screenshots).

Same way we can modify the layout of existing work items types, change their states and apply validation rules using below tabs.

Now next step is assign this new inherited process template to project comes under this organization. You can to All Processes > Process Template > Click on toggle button and Change process (As shown in below screenshots).

Once you successfully assign the customized process template to project. You can go to the Azure DevOps project and try to create new work item under Boards section. In my case you can see in below screenshot that new work item type “Proof Of Concept” is available. You can also see the new field are available and we can specify the required details and save it.

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