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Workflow existing work item

You'll likely want to review existing issues first. cd into your repository and use doing list for a quick view. If you need more detail you can use doing open to open relevant views in the azure devops web portal, for example doing open issues, doing open board or doing open sprint.

Start on an existing issue

Once you have the issue ID you want to work on, you'll need to create a remote branch and a pull request to be able to start work. You can do that with the doing pr create command. doing follows the branch naming convention <work_item_id>_<issue title>, where the issue title is transformed to snake_case. You can safely run this command multiple times: if the branch already exists, it will use that one, and if the PR already exists for that branch, doing will let you know.

$ doing pr create 146545 
> Created remote branch '146545_fixing_a_small_typo'
> Created pull request #49281 'fixing a small typo'
        > linked work item #146545
        > set auto-complete to True'
        > set to delete remote source branch after PR completion
        > added reviewers: '<your email>'
        $ Running command: git fetch origin
        ...
        # Running command: git checkout -b '146545_fixing_a_small_typo' 'origin/146545_fixing_a_small_typo'

You can also create a draft PR, assign reviewers, run the git checkout commands and more. See doing pr create --help for the options. Some examples:

doing pr create 146545 --reviewers "john.doe@email.com"
doing pr create 146545 --checkout --draft

Start on existing pull request

doing list will also show you if a work item already has a pull request associated with it. Alternatively doing pr list will show you a list of active pull requests. Once you have a pullrequest ID that you want to get started on, you can use doing pr checkout to quickly git checkout the branch locally. This is more convenient than manually finding the correct branchname and checkout it out locally (the 'long worflow'):

doing pr checkout <pullrequest_id>

doing open pr <pullrequest_id> # find branch name
git fetch origin
git checkout -b '{branch_name}' 'origin/{branch_name}'

Using aliases

To avoid having to type the emailadresses of your teammates every time (which are case sensitive in Azure), you can setup aliases in your .doing-cli-config.yml (see also config file reference):

doing pr create 146545 --reviewers "john jane"

# ... other config items ...
user_aliases:
   john: John.Doe@company.com
   jane: Jane.Doe@email.net

Wrap up

When you're done you can view the:

  • pull request using doing open pr <pullrequest id>. Use doing list to find your PR id.
  • issue using doing open issue <issue id>. The git branch name has the issue id as a prefix, or alternatively you can use doing list to find the issue id.
  • active pull requests using doing open prs
  • pipeline runs using doing open pipe