Configure Azure DevOps for work management only.
If you are using Azure DevOps just to manage work you can turn off/hide the rest of the product. Lets assume for a minute you just want Azure Boards and Azure Test Plans. Therefore we’ll turn off the references to Pipelines, Repos and Artifacts that we can.
The first change is to remove these tools altogether by going to Project Settings — Overview and turn off Repos, Pipelines and Artifacts.
That is the obvious change most people know about. What I find a lot of people don’t do are these changes.
Go to Process under Organization Settings and open the inherited process template you are using for your project.
Open the Task and hide the two sections named Deployment and Development.
These show references to the work item from a release, or a Pull Request/Commit. If we are not using Repos and Pipelines we don’t need them taking up space on the work item form.
You will want to do this on these work items as well:
- Basic Process: Issue, Test Case
- Agile Process: Epic, Feature, User Story, Bug, Issue, Test Case
- Scrum Process: Epic, Feature, Product Backlog Item, Bug, Impediment, Test Case
- CMMI Process: Epic, Feature, Requirement, Bug, Issue, Change Request, Risk, Review, Test Case
If you are using a process template with a Bug, you could also hide the Found in Build and Integrated in Build fields on the bug.
Now you have a cleaner work item form, without a bunch of unused fields.
If your team starts using any of these tools you can just switch them back to show on layout.
