In this post I am sharing a useful technique that I learned working with some clever Business Analysts, which involves pre-populating User Stories with default values.
With work item templates, you can quickly create work items that have pre-populated values for your team’s commonly used fields. For example, create a template that defines the area path, iteration path, and activity to use when creating a task.
Microsoft Learn – Azure DevOps Boards – Use templates to add and update work items in Azure Boards and Visual Studio
Prefill an Item
In the sample below, you can see how I can create a new User Story and prefill the “Description” and “Acceptance Criteria” fields with some pre-defined value to help the team being consistent when writing User Stories.
You can apply this techniques to pre-populate any other item in Azure DevOps boards like “Epics”, “Features”, or “Bugs”, etc.
Create a new Template
To create a new template, create a new User Story (or any other Item you want to capture a template for), and fill the fields with the values that you want capture in your template. Then:
- Click on the “3 dots” icon in the top left menu.
- Click on Templates
- Click on Capture…
