Showing Dependencies between work items in Azure DevOps
One feature I wanted a for a long long time was the ability to visually see dependencies between work items in Azure DevOps.
The ability to create the dependency has been in Azure DevOps since the TFS days, by using the Successor/Predecessor relationship.
In the past I’ve used MS Project to create stories and tasks making them dependent on each other so the MS Project Gantt chart can be built. From MS Project you could publish to Azure DevOps and the relationship was preserved, but there was no built in way to visually see the dependency in Azure DevOps.
There have been a few extensions in the market place that were not too bad. However now you can see those relationships in Delivery Plans.
Let me show you how.
Create a delivery plan by selecting the Project, Team, and Backlog Level.
As an example I’ll create one that builds a plan using the product backlog items from two different teams.
This gives me a plan that shows all the work planned for both teams over next few sprints.
So how do we know if any of these work items have a dependency on another work item?
When you expand the teams you will see the dependency icon on the work item tile. If it’s green the dependency is ok, if it’s red something is wrong.
Click on the icon and Azure DevOps will show you the dependency.
In the example below the dependency is actually between one of it’s child tasks and a child task of another backlog item.
You can also get a quick view of the dependencies across sprints in the plan. Click the dependency icon at the top of the plan.
Now we can see there is a dependency between items in Sprints 1 and 3. Which is fine, however if the bug being fixed is sprint 1 slips into the next sprint we might have to move the item in sprint 3.
We can also see an issue between Sprints 1 and 2. Looks like something here is going to have to move because it’s red.
Hope you find this feature as useful as I do.
