Link stories in an Azure Board Sprint to a release

Question

I'm using the Agile Process template in Azure Boards to run Scrum. I need to be able to link a story to a release so that I can report on what features shipped in a given release.

In Jira, I would have done it by creating a Release, and then adding completed stories to the release as they finished, and then finally "releasing" the release once we shipped to prod (usually a few days after the sprint ends, since our sprint ends on Friday/we don't release on the weekend)

I don't see a similar mechanism in Azure boards. I have iterations, but even if I assume an iteration == a release, that doesn't account for hotfixes or for stories that don't finish during a sprint.

Any advice on how to handle these?

Answer 1

We manage this with a Release Iteration. In that iteration/sprint, we have our regression activities, then our non-functionals like documentation updates. Under that documentation story is a release note task, where we use a query to pull the release note text from items under the parent iteration. e.g. product\version\sprint 1, product\version\sprint 2, product\version\release sprint, and we query release note text where iteration path under product\version.

Stories we don't finish are de-scoped so the iteration path is set back to the backlog. If we deliver some of the functionality, we just move out the tasks/bugs which we want to backlog to come back to.