In my previous post, I outlined how to setup templates for pull-requests. Today we’ll focus on how to configure work-items with some project-specific templates. We’ll also look at how you can create these customizations for all projects within the enterprise and the motivations for doing so.
While having a good pull-request template can improve clarity and reduce the effort needed to approve pull-requests, having well defined work-items are equally as important as they can drive and shape the work that needs to happen. We can define templates for our work-items to encourage work-item authors to provide the right level of detail (such as steps to reproduce a defect) or we can use templates to reduce effort for commonly created work-items (such as fields that are common set when creating a technical-debt work-item).
Creating Work-Item Templates
Although you can define pull-request templates as files in your git repository, Azure DevOps doesn’t currently support the ability to customize work-items as managed source files. This is largely due to the complexity of work-items structure and the level of customization available, so our only option to date is to manipulate the templates through the Azure Boards user-interface. Fortunately, it’s relatively simple and there are a few different ways you can setup and customize your templates – you can either specify customizations through the Teams configuration for your Project, or you can extract a template from an existing work item.
As extracting from an existing work-item is easier, we’ll look at this first.
Creating Templates from Existing Work-Items
To create a template from an existing work item, simply create a new work-item that represents the content that you’d like to see in your template. The great news is that our template can capture many different elements, ranging from the description and other commonly used fields to more specialized fields like Sprint or Labels.
It’s important to note that templates are team specific, so if you’re running a project with multiple scrum teams, each team can self-organize and create templates that are unique to their needs.
Here’s an example of user story with the description field pre-defined:
Once we like the content of the story, we can convert it into a template using the ellipsis menu (…) Templates –> Capture:
The capture dialog allows us to specify which fields we want to include in our template. This typically populates with the fields that have been modified, but you can remove or add any additional fields you want:
As some fields are stored in the template as HTML, using this technique of creating a template from an existing work-item is especially handy.
Customizing Templates
Once you’ve defined the template, you find them in Settings –> Team Configuration. There’s a sub-navigation item for Templates.
Applying Templates
Once you have the template(s) created, there are a few ways you can apply them to your work-items: you can apply the template to the work-item while you’re editing it, or you can apply it to the work-item from the backlog. Both activities are achieved using the ellipsis menu: Templates –> <template-name>.
The latter option of applying the template from the Backlog is extremely useful because you can apply the template to multiple items at the same time.
With some creative thinking, templates can be used like macros for commonly performed activities. For example, I created a “Technical Debt” template that adds a TechDebt tag, lowered priority and changes the Value Area to Architectural.
Creating Work-Items from Templates
If you want to apply the template to work-items as you create them, you’ll need to navigate to a special URL that is provided with each template (Settings –> Boards: Team Configuration –> Templates).
The Copy Link option copies the unique URL to the template to the clipboard, which you can circulate to your team. Personally, I like to create a Markdown widget on my dashboard that allows team members to navigate to this URL directly.
Going Further – Set defaults for Process Template
Unfortunately, there’s no mechanism to specify which work-item template should be used as the default for a team. You can however provide these customizations at the Process level, which applies these settings for all teams using that process template. Generally speaking, you should only make these changes for enterprise-wide changes.
Note that you can’t directly edit the default process templates, you will need to create a new process template based on the default: Organization Settings –> Boards –> Process:
Within the process, you can bring up any of the work-items into an editor that let’s you re-arrange the layout and contents of the work-item. To edit the Description field to have a default value, we select the Edit option in the ellipsis menu:
Remembering that certain fields are HTML, we can set the default for our user story by modifying the default options:
Wrapping up
Hopefully the last two posts for providing templates for pull requests and work-item templates has given you some ideas on how to quickly provide some consistency to your projects.
Happy coding!
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