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  1. Import & sync
  2. Import from Azure DevOps Boards

Import from Azure DevOps Boards

This page helps you bring Azure DevOps Boards work items into By Dawn. At the end they’re By Dawn tickets, epics and features are By Dawn epics, and, if you chose to keep syncing, the two stay in step until your end date. Import and sync explains the steps every tracker shares, so this page covers only what’s particular to Azure DevOps.

Before you start

Section titled “Before you start”
  • You need to be a project admin in By Dawn.
  • Your By Dawn organization must already be connected to Azure DevOps: an owner does that once under Settings › Azure DevOps. There’s no separate token for Boards. The import acts as the person who made that connection, so it sees the projects they can see.
  • If you’ve connected Azure DevOps for pull requests already, nothing else is needed: the same connection covers work items, read and write.

Connect

Section titled “Connect”

  1. In By Dawn, open Settings › Import & sync › New import and pick Azure DevOps.

  2. Choose Use it. By Dawn uses your organization’s connection, so there’s nothing to paste.

Pick what to bring

Section titled “Pick what to bring”
  • Project: every work item in one project. Choose this if you might create tickets in By Dawn that should appear in Azure DevOps, because a new work item needs a project to go into.
  • Area path: one team’s work, such as Acme\Web\Checkout, including everything under it.
  • WIQL query: any flat work-item query, such as SELECT [System.Id] FROM WorkItems WHERE [System.TeamProject] = 'Acme' AND [System.State] <> 'Removed'. By Dawn uses only the WHERE part, so ORDER BY is ignored, and tree or direct-link queries aren’t accepted.

How Azure DevOps maps

Section titled “How Azure DevOps maps”
  • Statuses. By Dawn proposes a column from each state’s category: Proposed goes to a to-do column, In Progress to a building column, Resolved to a review column, and Completed and Removed to a completed column. Removed items also get a resolution: label.
  • Priorities. Priority 1 → Urgent, 2 → High, 3 → Medium, 4 → Low.
  • Epics and features both become By Dawn epics by default, and the items under them join the epic. Below that, By Dawn nests one more level, so deeper trees are flattened to sub-tickets, with a related link back to the lost parent.
  • Iterations can become By Dawn cycles, sprint: labels, or nothing. Only current and future iterations join a cycle.
  • Tags become labels.
  • Descriptions are converted from HTML to markdown. Tables with merged cells become a quoted block, so nothing is dropped.

When you sync both ways

Section titled “When you sync both ways”

By Dawn writes back the title, description, state, priority, assignee and tags, plus new comments. Due dates come from Azure DevOps but aren’t written back.

Every update tells Azure DevOps which revision it was based on. If someone changed the work item in the meantime, Azure DevOps refuses the update, and By Dawn settles it the way it settles any change made on both sides (see When both sides change the same field), so a newer edit is never overwritten blindly.

New tickets you create in By Dawn become the project’s default backlog item type, such as a User Story or a Product Backlog Item, and only on a connection that names a project.

By Dawn asks Azure DevOps to tell it about changes in the projects a sync covers, so they usually reach By Dawn within seconds. A connection scoped by a query across projects is checked every few minutes instead.

Where to go next

Section titled “Where to go next”