& gt & gt Hi, I & # 39 m Donovan Brown Principal DevOps Manager from Microsoft.. I & # 39 m, a firm believer that to be good at DevOps. You first have to be good at Agile., Both Visual Studio Team services and Team Foundation. Server offer features that you need to manage your work from backlogs and boards to a powerful query, language and delivery. Plans., Let & # 39 s, jump right into the product and let me show you how it works.. Here I am on the landing page of my Visual Studio Team services account where I list all my projects and I can actually just click on the & quot Work & quot link here and it & # 39 s, going to take me to my product backlog.. A product backlog is a prioritized list of all the items your team wants to accomplish in developing this piece of software.. What & # 39 s? Really nice? Is it & # 39 s, really easy to add items to your backlog.? I can simply come in here and type in a title and then simply click on & quot Add & quot. Once the item has been added to my backlog, I can simply drag and drop it to determine where it belongs. On my backlog. I can double click on it and I can see more details.. For example, I can apply a story point value. If you want to use this for velocity., I can control who this is assigned to on my particular team.. I can go back in and give it a description and acceptance criteria and even link other items to it. Saving. It puts all that stuff back inside of VSTS for me.. What & # 39 s really nice is. I can actually have backlogs at different levels.. This one is currently at the story level, but if I go up to the feature I have one there as well and I can go all the way up to an epic.. Then, when I & # 39 m at the higher levels, I can use this & quot Plus & quot button here to actually see how my entire project is made up all the way down to the task. Level.. If I go back down to my story level, I actually have some more features on this backlog that I don & # 39 t have, on the other two., For example, I can turn on forecasting. Forecasting uses pop over to these guys estimated in story points here on each item And our team & # 39 s, known velocity, which you would get after working together for a while.. Now the tool has helped me determine which iterations I will be able to deliver these particular items. In.. If I agree with them, I can simply take an item and drag and drop it to that particular iteration to assign it to that iteration.. As you can see, I can only do these first two items, because I would need two more story points to be able to get all of them in there, and this is the most that I can actually fit.. So forecasting is a really cool tool to allow you to help plan what you believe that your team is going to be able to do based on your historic velocity.. Not only can I see the backlog at these levels, I can actually go down to the actual iteration itself.. When I do that, I get to see some really cool stuff start to light up.. For example, I can start to see capacity planning on the left-hand side.. As my team comes into these items and starts to break them down, we can actually give estimates on these particular items.. For example, I want to say work remaining is three and I can even decide what type of activity this is going to be.. If this is going to be deployment, design or development, I & # 39 ll say this is going to be a development task.. When I do that, you & # 39 ll start to see the development numbers over here, starting to change.. In doing so, I & # 39 m able to determine if I have enough capacity in each discipline, as I start to estimate my work so that my team doesn & # 39 t overcommit to delivering something., I can see it by activity type. felix furniture website can see it by which individual is currently assigned to, and I have enough resources of each type and each person to get the work actually done., So capacity planning can also be modified here on the & quot Capacity & quot tab. This allows me to identify all the team members in my team and identify what activity they play on that particular team.. If a person, for example, myself was more more than one head on your team, you can actually add an additional activity and then give them a capacity per day of that particular activity.. So I & # 39 m, going to be spending some of my time on deployment and some of my time on. Development. - If I needed to have days off, I can actually apply days off here as well. To make sure I have an accurate record of what my team is capable of in each individual sprint.. Not only can you view this as a backlog, you can also view these as boards. Here at the sprint level or the interation level. We & # 39 re. Looking at a task board., This shows me the work item on the left-hand side, which is the parent and all the task underneath that have to be accomplished. For this to be complete or done., To update my status, I can simply drag and drop.. If I & # 39 m done with it, what I really like about this as well is that I can come here and quickly adjust the number of hours remaining.. I might not complete this task in a day, but it & # 39 s important for me to update how much work is remaining so that my burn downs burn down correctly. Too many developers wait till they & # 39 re done to adjust this value and They & # 39 re, not giving their scrum master the information and the ammunition to make sure that we & # 39 re going to deliver on our sprint goal.. But this is very simple.. I simply say there & # 39 s an hour left here. There is two hours left here and my burn down now is going to burn down correctly. Anywhere that you see this gear is an opportunity for you to customize what it is that you & # 39 re viewing.. I can customize how task look, how bugs look and even how the user stories appear on my task, board. I can determine which backlogs I want at which levels.. So if you don & # 39, t use epic or features you don & # 39 t have to go that high.. How many days we actually work. If you work seven days a week, you can adjust that.. If I want my bugs to show up on my backlogs and my task board, just like other work, some teams prefer that some teams do not, and you can customize that right, here. A task board is great, but when you go to a higher level like a Story or feature you & # 39 re more looking at a Kanban board.. This is where the overarching item is actually going to move across the board.. You also can apply things like WIP limits, which is a work in progress, and this let & # 39 s. Us know that we have too much work in the active state and before we pull anything else over there, we have to get something out of there and move it into the resolve state, and this makes sure that you get stuff done.. You can adjust those WIP limits and your definition of done if you need to. Just like before, I simply drag and drop to update my particular status.. Another thing I like about the Kanban board is the ability for me to quickly see how many task are underneath and I can even mark them as & quot, Complete & quot right here on the Kanban board.. I can also see which task have test on them, and this is going to find the acceptance criteria for this particular item.. If your team is using Git as your source control directly from this board, you can actually create a new branch for this particular piece of work.. This is going to make an association, as you can see down at the bottom, between this branch and that particular work. Item., If you & # 39 re like me, you & # 39, ve created more branches, and you know what to do with and you don & # 39 t even remember why you created them., But when you create a branch from the Kanban board, that branch And that work item are immediately associated together., But it gets even better. If we commit to this branch. Every CI build that is triggered and every release that is deployed is automatically associated to this work. Item., You & # 39 re, going to get into entraceability all from simply creating a branch.. So having your work item tracking your source control, your build and your release, all in one product gives you this unparalleled traceability for making a very simple gesture like that one.. So here we & # 39 ve, been able to look at our capacity planning. We & # 39 ve, also been able to look at how we would set up our iterations and our sprints.. We just want to show you that getting started with Agile is very simple inside of the Visual Studio Team Services family., But there & # 39 s, two other places. I want to show you before we leave.. One of them is the query language.. Once you have lots and lots of work items inside of your backlog, it can sometimes be difficult to find the one that you & # 39 re interested in.. Thanks to our query language, you can come in here with this really nice. Wysiwyg editor, add new criteria and pinpoint the item that you & # 39 re. Looking for., Then you simply run the criteria and then you & # 39 ll, get back the results down here at the bottom and quickly find the item that you & # 39 re. Looking for. There & # 39 s. Also, a & quot Work Items & quot tab here, which is focused for the individual who & # 39 s, viewing this screen.. So now I & # 39 m, not cluttered up with all the information of other people. I get to see all the work that & # 39 s currently assigned to me so that I know exactly what I can focus on.. Now this I & # 39 m drilling into a specific project and I & # 39 m, seeing the work that is assigned to me at the project level.. But if we back all the way back up to where we were at the beginning, when we came into this particular application in the landing page, I don & # 39 t even have to choose a project there & # 39 s, a new work item here That allows me to see all my work across all the projects inside of this particular Visual Studio Team Services account.. So regardless, if you & # 39 re using Kanban, Agile or scrum, you & # 39 re, going to be able to find the tools that you need inside of Visual Studio Team Services to manage your work and manage your sprints. Before I go. I want to encourage you to visit docs.microsoft.com to learn more about Agile planning.