Get started managing your project

Azure DevOps Services | Azure DevOps Server | Azure DevOps Server 2022

As a member of the Project Administrators group, you're responsible for configuring resources, managing permissions, and setting policies for your project. This article walks through the key tasks to set up and maintain a project in Azure DevOps.

Prerequisites

Add users to your project

Add users to a team or project so they can contribute. Adding a user to a team automatically adds them to the project's Contributors group, which grants permissions for work items, code, builds, and releases. Team members also appear in team-specific tools like sprint capacity planning and the Team Members widget.

For more information, see Add users or groups to a team or project. For an overview of default permissions, see Default permissions quick reference.

Share your project vision

Use the project summary page to share goals and onboarding information through a README file. For more detailed documentation, create a project wiki to capture processes, procedures, and guidelines.

Enable or disable services

Simplify the web portal by disabling services your project doesn't use. For example, if you only track bugs, disable everything except Boards. For more information, see Turn a service on or off.

Manage security and permissions

Security groups and permissions control who can access and modify resources in your project. Review Default permissions and access to understand what users can do by default, then see Change project-level permissions to adjust them.

The following table lists the permissions assigned at the project-level. All these permissions are granted to members of the Project Administrators group, except for the Delete shared Analytics views and Edit shared Analytics views permissions. For a description of each permission, see Permissions and groups reference, Groups.

Add members to the Project Administrators group

The person who creates a project is automatically added to the Project Administrators group. Add at least one other member to this group to ensure continuity. See Add members to the Project Administrators group.

Grant or restrict permissions

As a project administrator, you can grant or restrict permissions at the project and object levels. To delegate tasks to others, you can:

• Add users to a built-in or custom security group
• Assign role-based permissions for resources like agent pools, service connections, and pipelines
• Restrict access to specific features

Review and update notifications

Each project comes with default notification subscriptions. You can also define team or project-level subscriptions. If users receive too many notifications, direct them to manage their personal notifications.

Set up end-to-end traceability

Link work items, commits, builds, and test results to track changes from requirements through deployment. For more information, see End-to-end traceability and Cross-service integration overview.

Set DevOps policies

Set policies to help enforce code quality, compliance, and resource management across your project.

• Branch policies — Require reviewers, enforce successful builds, or block direct pushes to protected branches. See Manage branch policies.
• TFVC check-in policies — Enforce rules like code analysis or work item association before check-in. See Add check-in policies.
• Pipeline retention policies — Control how long to keep build and release runs, artifacts, and logs. See Set retention policies.
• Test retention policies — Set how long to keep automated and manual test results. See Set test retention policies.

Configure and customize Azure Boards

At a minimum, configure area paths to group work items by team, product, or feature area, and iteration paths to group work into sprints or milestones. For a full overview of configuration options, see Configure and customize Azure Boards.

Define area and iteration paths

Define area paths to organize work by team, product, or feature area. Define iteration paths to assign work to sprints or milestones. This configuration is required for sprint backlogs, taskboards, and capacity planning. For an overview, see About areas and iteration paths.

Customize work-tracking processes

Customize the work-tracking experience through the user interface to meet your team's needs. Establish a process for evaluating and approving changes before updating the process.

For more information, see About process customization and inherited processes and Customize a project.

Integrate with other services

Azure DevOps integrates with Azure, GitHub, and many other services. You can also extend functionality by installing extensions from the Marketplace.

Add teams to scale your project

As your organization grows, add teams so each team gets its own set of customizable Agile tools – backlogs, boards, sprints, and dashboards.

For more information, see Add a team and Add a team administrator.

Related content

• View and update project summary page
• Get started managing your organization or project collection
• About user, team, project, and organization-level settings