<h2>Using Azure Boards for Mobile App Development: Effective Strategies for Issue Tracking and Management</h2>
<p>Azure Boards is a standalone service within the Azure DevOps suite that helps teams plan, track, and discuss work across the entire software development process. It provides a flexible, customizable platform for managing work items, such as user stories, bugs, tasks, and issues, so you can track your work item&#8217;s progress throughout the development lifecycle.</p>
<h3>How to use Azure Boards effectively in mobile app development?</h3>
<ul>
<li>Define a Clear Project Structure: Organize your projects, teams, and boards in a logical and structured manner. This includes creating separate boards for different projects, setting up teams with appropriate permissions, and defining iteration cycles (sprints) for agile development.</li>
<li>Configure your sprints: It is important to establish a consistent sprint cadence for all teams within your product group. This ensures synchronized planning and collaboration. Additionally, defining at least six or more iterations helps support long-term planning, allowing you to align your roadmap and allocate resources effectively. When managing backlog items within iterations, you can choose to assign unassigned sprint work to the default backlog, allowing teams to pick them up based on their capacity, or assign them to a designated future backlog sprint for more structured planning.</li>
<li>Choose your work item types: Determine which work item types your team will use to capture customer requirements and development work. If your project is based on the Agile process, we recommend using User Stories, Bugs, and Features.</li>
<li>Create your product plan: Create your product plan using the Features Backlog. The development team then creates their product plan using the Product Backlog. Periodically you should review and refine your product plans.</li>
<li>Regularly Monitor and Review Progress: Monitor the progress of work items and projects using Azure Boards&#8217; reporting and visualization features. Review burndown charts, velocity reports, and other metrics to assess team performance, identify bottlenecks, and make data-driven decisions. Regularly review and adapt your processes based on the insights gained.</li>
</ul>
<h3>How to integrate Azure Boards with Appcircle</h3>
<p>Appcircle can integrate with other tools to send instant notifications for your builds. Azure Boards is one of the many supported integration solutions that is supported by Appcircle. Azure Boards is a standalone service within the Azure DevOps suite that helps teams plan, track, and discuss work across the entire software development process. It provides a flexible, customizable platform for managing work items, such as user stories, bugs, tasks, and issues, so you can track your work item&#8217;s progress throughout the development lifecycle.</p>
<p>It is fairly easy to integrate Azure Boards into your workflow. Azure Boards step can be added after any step. According to the status of the step, it can write a comment or transition the issue to another state.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.appcircle.io/docs/assets/azure-component1.png" alt="Azure Boards Integration" /></p>
<h4>Credentials</h4>
<p>In order to use Azure Boards Component, you need to configure the component and add the necessary credentials. It is strongly advised to add the credentials of your Azure instance with locked environment variables.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.appcircle.io/docs/assets/azure-component2.png" alt="Azure Boards Credentials" /></p>
<ul>
<li><code>AC_AZUREBOARD_INSTANCE</code>: Instance. If you&#8217;re using a self-hosted instance, write the instance URL.</li>
<li><code>AC_AZUREBOARD_API_VERSION</code>: API Version. The version of the Azure DevOps Services REST API.</li>
<li><code>AC_AZUREBOARD_EMAIL</code>: Email. Email of Azure user. Please add this using <strong>locked</strong> environment variables.</li>
<li><code>AC_AZUREBOARD_TOKEN</code>: Personal Access Token. Personal access token of the user. It can be created by visiting User settings. Please add this using <strong>locked</strong> environment variables.</li>
<li><code>AC_AZUREBOARD_ORG</code>: Organization. Azure Organization. The organization can be identified by its URL, such as for the <code>https://dev.azure.com/JohnDoe/MyProject/_boards/board/t/MyTeam/Issues</code> <strong>JohnDoe</strong> is the organization name.</li>
<li><code>AC_AZUREBOARD_PROJECT</code>: Project. Azure Project. The project can be identified by its URL, such as for the <code>https://dev.azure.com/JohnDoe/MyProject/_boards/board/t/MyTeam/Issues</code> <strong>MyProject</strong> is the project name.</li>
</ul>
<p>After creating the above environment variables, please don&#8217;t forget to select and save them.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn.appcircle.io/docs/assets/azure-component3.png" alt="Azure Boards Environment Variables" /></p>
<h4>Configuring Component</h4>
<p>To add a comment, the issue id (<code>AC_AZUREBOARD_WORKITEM</code>) must be supplied to the component. We need to get this issue id dynamically so that our workflow can work for multiple branches. Appcircle components use environment variables to pass the state. We can add a step just before the Azure Boards Component to prepare the necessary environment variables.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s say, you&#8217;re working on a feature branch called <code>feature/onboarding-1</code>. You may use the below Ruby script to get the issue id <code>1</code> from the branch name and use this information with the Azure Boards component.</p>
<pre><code>
branch = ENV[&#039;AC_GIT_BRANCH&#039;]
issue_number = branch.split(&#039;-&#039;)[1]
puts issue_number

# Write Environment Variable
open(env_var_path, &#039;a&#039;) { |f|
    f.puts &quot;AC_AZUREBOARD_WORKITEM=#{issue_number}&quot;
}
  </code></pre>
<p>If you add state names for successful and failed steps (<code>AC_AZUREBOARD_FAIL_STATE</code>, <code>AC_AZUREBOARD_SUCCESS_STATE</code>), the Azure Boards component will automatically change the status of your issue according to the state of your workflow.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s give another example to use a state name and issue id from the commit message.</p>
<p>When the build starts, the <code>AC_COMMIT_MESSAGE</code> environment variable has the commit message. By using basic string scanning, we can easily extract the issue and state from the commit messages as well. Let&#8217;s say our commit message is <code>Added onboarding [Done] [1]</code>. Let&#8217;s assume <code>Done</code> is our success state and <code>1</code> is our issue id. We can extract both the state name and issue id from the commit message with a simple Ruby script.</p>
<pre><code>
message = ENV[&#039;AC_COMMIT_MESSAGE&#039;]

# Check for commit_message [success_state] [issue_id] pattern
if /(.*) \[(.*)\] \[(.*)\]/ =~ message
  issue_id = Regexp.last_match(3).to_s
  success_state = Regexp.last_match(2).to_s
  puts &quot;Issue Id #{issue_id}&quot;
  puts &quot;State #{success_state}&quot;

  File.open(env_var_path, &#039;a&#039;) do |f|
    f.puts &quot;AC_AZUREBOARD_WORKITEM=#{issue_id}&quot;
    f.puts &quot;AC_AZUREBOARD_SUCCESS_STATE=#{success_state}&quot;
  end
end
  </code></pre>
<p>You may also use the <code>AC_AZUREBOARD_FAIL_STATE</code> environment variable for a failed workflow step. If the previous workflow failed, the component will use this state name to change the status of the issue.</p>
<h4>Changing Template</h4>
<p>Appcircle provides a default template that adds the commit id, branch name, and a couple of environment variables. When you&#8217;re adding a comment, you may use HTML. This template can be edited and modified according to Azure API. You can check <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/azure/devops/wit/work-items/update?view=azure-devops-rest-7.0&amp;tabs=HTTP/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">this document</a> to create your custom comments.</p>
<p>Please check <a href="https://github.com/appcircleio/appcircle-azure-boards-component/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Azure Boards Component</a> documentation for more information.</p>


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