Your own tags now decide what counts as maintenance
Investment Allocation classified maintenance from a fixed list of seven tag names, so a team that labels its maintenance work any other way read 0% maintenance. An admin can now edit that list under Configuration, Item Types, Investment tags: add the tags you actually use, remove the ones you do not. The rule is unchanged: a whole tag, matched exactly, case ignored, never part of a word. Nothing moves until you edit the list.
Adding an exploration tag turns on a bucket that was not there
The same place holds a second list, Exploration tags, which starts empty. Add one or more, for example the tag you put on spikes, and Investment Allocation gains an Exploration share alongside Features, Bugs and Maintenance. Sprint Summary counts those items as exploration too, whatever their work item type, so research sitting on a User Story is no longer read as delivery. Every item still lands in exactly one bucket: a maintenance tag beats an exploration tag, and the editor refuses the same tag in both lists.
These lists reach two views, and we would rather say so
Being straight about the limit: these lists are read by Investment Allocation and Sprint Summary in this release, and nowhere else. Cycle Time buckets, Sprint Burndown and Next Sprint Planning still group work by item type alone, so if you use exploration tags their figures can differ from Sprint Summary’s until those views follow the same lists. Nothing in them changed here.
A reopened item now ends its cycle where every other view says
Flow Efficiency stopped an item’s clock the first time it reached done, so an item closed, reopened and closed again showed only its final stretch of work: one story read 1.2 days there while Cycle Time and the Executive Report read 10.2 days for it. Flow Efficiency and the service level tables now measure from the first start to the final close, rework included, and time spent closed before a reopen counts as waiting. Numbers can move, and only for teams with reopened items.
Three more places stopped saying more than they knew
On Flow Metrics, the throughput distribution counted the sprint in progress as a finished sample, so a team’s variance verdict got worse whenever a new sprint opened. It now uses the same finished sprints as the average above it. When your organisation limits deployment frequency to selected pipelines and none of them ran in the project you are viewing, DORA Metrics says so and points at the setting. Sprint Detail shows a dash for cycle time in an empty sprint, instead of a zero nobody measured.
Since our last post here
This blog fell behind the product again, so here is the short version. Multi-Team Aging now folds in still-open items carried over from each team’s previous sprint, labelled as carryover. Investment Allocation gained an opt-in that leaves Tasks out, for teams whose Tasks are story breakdown. Epic and Feature Analytics explain why a view could not load instead of always blaming permissions. Changing the team at the top of the hub moves every view with it, and the hub speaks your language in three more places.
Updating
Azure DevOps updates the extension automatically, nothing to install. Everything above works with your data staying inside your Azure DevOps organisation: no PAT, no data sent to us. If a figure still looks wrong after the update, use Ask Henry in the top bar and a real person replies within one business day.
Related: Service status