Month: October 2019

Tracking and classifying Azure DevOps work items in SRE toil budgets

keithbabinec1 Comment

In Google’s Site Reliability Engineering book, the chapter on toil (tedious, manual operational work) asserts that we should keep toil work amounts to only a small fraction of our total engineering hours. The reason for this is that too much toil work negatively impacts the engineering team.

In this post we will review some toil basics, talk about why toil tracking matters, and see how we can leverage Azure DevOps to track and classify our sprint work for enhanced toil budget tracking.

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How to visually highlight blocked work items on an Azure DevOps sprint board

keithbabinec11 Comments

A little over a year ago I wrote up a tutorial on how to visually highlight blocked work items on a sprint board for Visual Studio Team Services. VSTS re-branded as Azure DevOps soon after I published that post and so some of the UI instructions have changed slightly now. I decided to make a follow up that runs through the exact same procedure but under the newer Azure DevOps re-branded UI.

Visually highlighting blocked work items is great way for developers, PMs, and the product owner to glance at the board to see blockers without having to deep dive into work items or run extra queries. Read on to find out how it’s done.

March 2021 Update: You can also use this technique for highlighting overdue items, tutorial here.

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