I work with a Scrum Master who joined an established team that uses a Physical Kanban board (Post-it Notes on a white board to track their work). Since this has been working well for them, the Scrum Master doesn’t want to disrupt their process. However, there is a need to track that work inside Azure DevOps. We wanted to enter the work items in Azure DevOps, and we were even able to faithfully replicate their physical board inside Azure DevOps boards. Still, that big physical board is a great way to view what is happening, and the team wants to keep using it. I was asked if we could print out “Cards” for those work items so that they can be used to put up on the physical board. There was no good out-of-the box solution, but the Marketplace led to one promising extension name “Pretty Cards” that promised to enable printing of cards. Unfortunately, we found the work-item support in that extension was lacking, and the fields and card layout were not exactly what we were looking for. I went to the GitHub repo for that extension to see if I could request changes or what they were doing with Pull Requests. I found there were other people submitting similar requests to what I would submit, but they had not gotten any responses in close to a year. There were also old Pull Requests that were not getting anywhere, so I felt that repository was dead.
I had a need and I had a dead extension that was “close”, so my next-best course of action was to fork that repository and make the changes I needed. I have published a new Azure DevOps extension to the Marketplace to enable users to Print Kanban-style cards for their Work Items. The Extension can be found here Print Physical Cards
This extension improves upon Pretty Cards in that it will print any Work Item type; Pretty card could only print User Story, Task, or Bug, which left people who were not using the Agile process template high and dry. My new extension also prints out a more consistent set of fields. I include things like Title, Assigned To, and estimate value (Story Points are used for User Stories, Business Value used for things like Feature and Epic, Original Estimate value used for Tasks, etc.). Also supported are printing Tags, which was something my client leveraged on Work Items. You can also multi-select work items and print multiple cards at once! It fits three cards to a page and will page break to avoid cards split across pages.
Here is an example output of some cards that I selected to print:
