Customizing Columns in Your Azure DevOps Sprint/Task Boards

Kanban flow of the Azure Boards for user stories, features or other top level back log boards was a feature available in Azure DevOps Boards for a long time. However, it was not possible to change the sprint board columns in Azure DevOps, without introducing new states to Task work item or any work item which is using sprint board previously. This long awaited community request has been now completed and available in Azure DevOps services. Azure DevOps on-premise server does not have this feature we can hope it would be added to the on-premise server eventually. Let’s look at how we can customize the columns in the Sprint boards with this new feature.

Making a Task Group Parameter Optional – Azure DevOps Pipelines

Task groups are really useful to share common actions with multiple build or release pipelines in Azure DevOps (VSTS). You can group multiple tasks ang create a task group forma build or release definition. then these task groups can be utilized in other build or release definitions in a given team project. Parameters in a task group help to pass values from build or release definition to the tasks in the task group. You can add a default value for these parameters or have to provide value from the build or release definition that is using the task group. Making a task group parameter optional is not straight forward and you need some do work around to get it working. Let’s look at how we can make a parameter optional for a task group in Azure DevOps pipelines.