Work item tracking tools play a crucial role in the DevOps process, helping teams plan new features, resolve bugs efficiently, and keep everyone up-to-date on each ticket’s progress. Using work items to track your work provides a host of benefits, including the ability to share and track flow, support traceability, add context, share progress and status.
We have been putting in major effort towards enhancing FlexDeploy’s long-established integration with work item tracking systems. The upcoming 7.0 release will include another significant upgrade in FlexDeploy’s work item integration with the introduction of release work items.
What are Release Work Items?
The new work item listing can be found on each release on the Definition tab, where you can toggle between viewing the projects and packages or the work items in a release. Beyond just tracking a list of relevant work items released, here’s a summary of the main work item integration features coming with 7.0.
Automatically Keep Release Content and Work Items in Sync
- Add a work item to your release and it will auto-add associated projects and packages as developers make changes. This can be helpful for a release manager who might have a list of work items planned to be released, but the FlexDeploy packages and project versions to be released don’t yet exist. Now, you can merely manage the work items in the release, and any content linked to those work items will be added to the release for you.
- Similarly, any work items linked to existing release content will be auto-added to the release for better traceability.
- Need to push out a work item to your next release? Simply remove the work item and it will find any related projects and packages to optionally remove from the release.
Quickly Search for External Work Items
- Conveniently search and select work item(s) in your external work item tracking tool for popular providers like Jira and Azure.
- Take advantage of this search capability on the build request form and package, where previously the full work item number had to be entered for linking.
Review What’s Been Deployed with Insights
- Navigate to the Insights tab on your release, where you will find Snapshot Work Items, which has a full record of work items that have been deployed between any two snapshots.
Conclusion
With release work items, you’ll be able to more easily manage dynamic release content, track what’s releasing, and have better visibility between FlexDeploy and your work item tracking provider. We’re looking forward to customers being able to try this out soon.
This blog gave you a sneak preview of some of the big changes coming in FlexDeploy. Join us on November 29th when we unveil FlexDeploy 7.0 and learn how it will unleash DevOps potential.
