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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