Azure Devops - Markdown Support In User Story Description / Acceptance Criteria Fields?

Question

My company is looking to streamline User Story documentation in DevOps's Agile workflow. Is there a way to use markdown formatting in Description / Acceptance Criteria fields in DevOps? It is far more flexible and powerful than the WYSIWYG editor available in DevOps.

Answer 1

You may have known that in Azure Devops, we haven't directly provide such feature in WIT. So, to achieve what you want, just consider to develop an extension.

For VSTS, there has an existing one Markdown. But I saw you tagged this question with a azure-devops-server-2019 tag. If your server type is TFS, please check this extension source code, and then made some customized changes into it to let it available for your server.

See how to develop extension for TFS work item.

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The working logic of this extension is adding a custom control which expand Markdown edit into work item layout.

Since what you are using is Azure Devops server 2019, below operation and its action logic also suitable for you.

With more details, in your requirement, you want the fields Description / Acceptance Criteria can support to use Markdown. This extension would let you add a custom control to User story.

• Step1: In its custom control, choosing Markdown as control type which can let this field control under Markdown.

• Step2: Choose which field you want to show Markdown editor for, here is Description

• Step3: Choosing corresponding layout location, store it in to a new group.

• Step4: You should not want there has two same editors on the work item form. So, hiding the default one:

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After the above steps, now, the Description fields can support Markdown language.