Importing requirements from Excel

In Scrum, the taskboard is a visual display of the progress of the Scrum team during a sprint. It presents a snapshot of the current sprint backlog, allowing everyone to stay synchronized and focused on the work to be done. Most of the time, smaller teams are distributed across multiple locations, and in these situations, tracking work with a digital tool helps distributed teams synchronize more effectively. Some of us are lucky enough to land on green field projects, which gives us the opportunity to start tracking the requirements of work items from inception. Other times, projects are planned in tools that don't natively support integration with Azure DevOps Server. Luckily, most planning tools allow you to extract the data to Excel. Azure DevOps Server natively supports importing work items through Excel, but the challenge is mostly working out which fields in the spreadsheet should map out to work items in Azure DevOps Server. In this recipe, we'll learn how to import requirements from Excel into work items and refresh updates from work items back into Excel.