Is there an equivalent of Jira-Releases in VSTS?

Question

In Jira, you can create Releases for a project. As part of a Release, you can specify which issues are part of it as well as add Release notes. These are extremely useful when you have automated build scripts, as the API for JIRA can be queried by the scripts as part of a CD pipeline.
You can therefore do things like (but not limited to):

• Fill in a changelog dynamically
• Stop deployment if there are an issues part of the Release that are not Done
• Retrieve version numbers

Question: Is there a VSTS equivalent?

Answer 1

I do not think there is currently anything directly comparable to a Jira 'release' built into Azure Devops, which would allow you to package up completed Work Items on a board into a 'Release' work item.

You could implement a "poor man's" version of this by creating a custom process for your project that included a new 'Release' work item type. Each 'Release work item' could then be manually linked to work items you want to include in that release and could contain custom fields for the 'version' number or any other meta data you wanted to store with that release. This could then later be queried from a CD pipeline which, taking one of your examples, would allow you to do something like iterate over the linked work items for the release and make sure they are in a 'done' status.

Edit: As an example of integration techniques, the REST API for Azure DevOps supports a simple REST GET request to query all work items in a project for a custom work item type:

GET https://dev.azure.com/{organization}/{project}/_apis/wit/reporting/workitemrevisions?types={YourCustomWorkItemType}&includeLatestOnly=true&api-version=4.1

The API will also return any custom fields you have associated with this WIT, listing them under the key 'Custom.{YourFieldName}' within the "fields" object of the WIT response.

If your team was working with sprints, the other potential method I could think of to do this would be for each 'sprint' to become a named version which would become your 'release' once the sprint was complete. Work items that were not implemented as part of that sprint/version/release) would then be moved into the next sprint or closed. I'm not sure this approach would be very sustainable for complex projects.

There are features of interest listed on the Azure Devops Features Timeline that may improve this workflow in the near future (for example, "Release traceability – Work Item integration", planned for implementation in 2018 Q4), although it's difficult to find out any implementation details.