Design and implement processes and communications
Process templates and hierarchies
Azure DevOps ships four process templates - Basic, Agile, Scrum and CMMI - and the work item hierarchy changes with each one. Agile is Epic > Feature > User Story > Task/Bug; Scrum replaces User Story with Product Backlog Item; CMMI inserts Requirement (and Change Request); Basic is Epic > Issue > Task. Bugs can be tracked at the backlog level or alongside tasks - that behaviour is configured in process settings, not in a query.
Area paths vs iteration paths
Area paths answer where work lives - team, product, component. Iteration paths answer when - the sprint cadence. Each team subscribes to specific area and iteration paths, which is how several teams share one project yet plan independently. Delivery Plans aggregate the iterations of multiple teams onto one calendar; that is the answer whenever a question mentions cross-team, multi-sprint visibility.
Communication surfaces
Dashboards host widgets such as velocity, burndown, query tiles and embedded content, and are scoped to a team or project. Wikis are Markdown stored in a Git repository - either a provisioned project wiki or code published as a wiki. Subscriptions, service hooks and the Azure Boards/Teams integrations push events out to email, Microsoft Teams, Slack or webhooks. Azure Boards also links to GitHub for commit mentions and work item references.
Traps
- Cross-team timeline requested → Delivery Plans, not a dashboard or query chart.
- Alerting humans on build failure → notification subscription or service hook, not a widget.
- Assuming every process template uses the same work item names.
- Confusing area path permissions with iteration path permissions.
Rule of thumb
Area = where, iteration = when, Delivery Plan = who and when across teams. When a question mentions two or more teams over time, reach for Delivery Plans.