Our development team uses GitHub for source control, but the project managers insist on using Azure Boards for sprint planning. We are having a hard time keeping the two in sync. Is there a native integration that allows a commit in GitHub to automatically update the status of an Azure Board work item, or do we need to build a custom logic using Power Automate?
3 answers
There is actually a very robust native integration for this! You don't need Power Automate. You can install the "Azure Boards" app from the GitHub Marketplace. Once configured, you can link your GitHub repository to your Azure DevOps project. After that, your developers just need to include the work item ID in their commit messages (e.g., "Fixing bug AB#123"). This will automatically link the commit to the work item in Azure Boards. You can even set up "Development" status rules so that a Pull Request being merged automatically moves the work item to the "Done" column.
While the native integration is great, have you considered how it handles "Repo-to-Project" mapping if you have a mono-repo in GitHub but multiple projects in Azure DevOps? Does the GitHub app allow for complex routing, or are you limited to a one-to-one relationship between the GitHub repo and the DevOps project?
The "Azure Boards" app for GitHub is definitely the way to go. It even shows the build and deployment status from Azure Pipelines directly on the GitHub PR page.
I second that, Nancy. The cross-platform visibility is the biggest selling point. It helps our QA team know exactly which environment a feature has been deployed to without leaving the Board.
Daniel, that’s where it gets a bit tricky. The app supports linking one repo to multiple projects, but the AB#ID system is global. If you have two work items with the same ID in different projects, it might cause confusion. We found that prefixing the project name in the board settings helps keep things organized. It's much better than the manual overhead we had before.