Aha! and Azure DevOps – Working Together, Sprinting Together

Aha! has improved its integration with Azure DevOps to improve release and sprint visibility for both developers and stakeholders.

Previously, developers creating child sprints in Azure DevOps for work items would cause those sprints to be mirrored as releases in Aha!. This would cause confusion as features would no longer be properly lined up to the originally defined releases. Additionally, it caused confusion about where specific capabilities were completed.

With this new change, the following has been improved:

• Aha! release information is maintained – Features and their defined releases stay grouped in Aha! irrespective of sprint assignments in Azure DevOps.

Source: Just Launched! — Enhanced Aha! + Azure DevOps Integration Supports Agile Sprints, Published November 13, 2019

• Sprint visibility in Aha! is clearer – Sprint information can be captured in a custom field in Aha! to enable reporting and monitoring of progress without needing to dive into Jira.

Source: Just Launched! — Enhanced Aha! + Azure DevOps Integration Supports Agile Sprints, Published November 13, 2019

Overall, the changes result in a simpler and more reliable way to track the progress of a given release without having to hunt outside of Aha!.

Our Take

We see the key benefit of Agile as delivering the right value at the right time. This is only possible when all stakeholders, including project managers and product managers, understand the composition of releases and their respective progress.

The important integration enhancements done by Aha! allows stakeholders to clearly see feature progress across sprints while maintaining overall release visibility – without ever having to leave Aha! to go to another application.

While Jira did contain most of this information, accessibility and availability can be a challenge to a diverse stakeholder population. Making information current, easy to access, and tied directly to the overall product roadmaps improves discoverability and visibility. This improvement leads to better outcomes as issues and roadblocks are more clearly outlined, thereby enabling teams to mitigate as necessary.

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