Problem statement

My employer has standardized on Azure DevOps Boards as the issue tracking system of record. I have become fond of this system and immensely respect its capabilities. Due to my role, I end up with a very large number of work items assigned to me across a very diverse number of different Azure DevOps organizations. While an extension exists to support Cross Account Query, it has a significant and insurmountable limitation that the accounts being queried must have a uniform “schema” for Iteration Path and Area Path. This limitation is a fact of life in my role.

This blog post shows my workaround that gives me the ability:

  • To see a comprehensive dashboard across the many different Azure DevOps organizations that contain work items assigned to me, so I can know which ones I need to work on in any given day.
  • To check them off task by task when I have done all I intend to do on that particular task today.
  • To reset the “done for today” status so I get a fresh dashboard the next day.

It is not very elegant, but works for me. I’m open to suggestions for improvements. Please leave a comment if you have any ideas.

Solution

  1. For each Azure DevOps organization, write and save a query that shows the work items assigned to me. Here are a screen grabs of two such queries.

    Azure DevOps query in the dd board

    Azure DevOps query in the em board

    Some things to note about these queries:

    • The Area Path values vary and are specific to the organization.
    • The Iteration Path values vary, but both have @CurrentIteration.
    • The State values vary and are specific to the organization.
    • They both have a funny Tags value: Does Not Contain edburns_done-for-today. This tag is obviously named.

  2. Write an anologous set of queries, but for the last clause the Tags value is Contains edburns_done-for-today.

  3. Use the Daily Links chrome extension to cause all the saved queries in a new browser tab. Install the Daily Links extension from the Chrome web store. This also works in Edge.

    Azure DevOps queries loaded by Daily Links extension

Daily wrangling

  1. Start of day process.

    1. Select the Daily Links button in the browser.

    2. For each tab:

      1. Decide which of the tasks you will NOT* be able to work on today.

      2. Apply the edburns_done-for-today tag to those issues.

      3. Re-run the query.

  2. End of day process.

    1. Select the Daily Links button in the browser.

    2. For each tab:

      1. Run the analogous “Contains done for today” query for that tab.

      2. Use the multi-issue edit feature to remove that tag.

Problems with this solution

  • You have to write 2N queries.

  • You pollute the tagspace with information that is only relevant to you.

  • The act of resetting the “done for today” tag is high effort. I suspect there is a way to make a batch process that just does this with one action, but I have not invested in learning how.

  • The quality of the queries regarding their ability to convey the context of each task is up to the query author. In my implementation, I simply include Parent next te Title in the Column options.