Date fields in Azure DevOps
Note: It might be worth scanning this article first so you fully understand states in Azure DevOps — Work Item States in Azure DevOps.
Work items in Azure DevOps have a hand full of fields that don’t show up on the work item form. What I’m going to talk about here, are actually a combination of two fields: a date and a user.
When state changes on a work item the system will automatically update a corresponding date field to now, and the corresponding user field with the user who performed the change.
Here is a list of those state changes and their corresponding fields.
Created
The date and time when the work item is created and who created it.
- Created Date and Created By
Activated
The date and time when the work item was set to active or committed and who activated it.
- Activated Date and Activated by
Closed
The date and time when a work item was closed, and who closed it.
- Closed Date and Closed by
Resolved
The date and time when the work item was moved into a resolved state, and who by.
- Resolved Date and Resolved By
Others
There is also a more generic field that just gets set every time a work item is changed. The date and time when a work item was modified and who modified it.
- Changed Date and Changed By
There is also the date and time when the value of the State field changed. This is for any state change.
- State Changed Date
Although these fields are not included on the work item forms, you can use them in queries or add them to your work item form.
Examples
Example 1
Create a query to show bugs greater than 90 days old. Include who created the bug and when in the query results.
Example 2
Add the Created by field to your work item form. So you can easily see who the author of this work item was.
These fields can also be used to calculate Lead time, Cycle Time, Age, Churn (activated-resolved-closed-activated-resolved-activated).
Be aware: As mentioned, when you activate a story, the activated date will be set. However if you then switch it back the new, the activated date will be cleared out. However the history will always show when it was activated the first time.
