At Microsoft, architects often execute the same steps repeatedly across multiple customers when following business processes–at least that’s the goal…to be consistent. Maintaining the same process and remembering to align all necessary resources can be overwhelming. It can be easy to overlook certain tasks. There is always a number of variables that must be considered and steps that must be followed for a smooth implementation.

Maintaining consistency and the flow of information between team members can also be cumbersome. With the lack of consistency, the hand-offs between team members can be less than ideal and can degrade the effectiveness of the team. This results in a poor experience for our customers.

A tool was needed that could assist teams in consistently following a set of predefined steps. Therefore, the Azure Backlog Generator was created for this purpose. Azure Backlog Generator, or AzBacklog, is a Python script that automatically generates backlogs of predefined steps in either Azure DevOps or GitHub. Version 1 of AzBacklog supports creating backlogs for the Cloud Adoption Framework and the Enterprise-scale Landing Zones (also of CAF). AzBacklog can be installed via pip, the Python package manager.

The project information and repository can be found on GitHub.

Future releases will support additional backlogs as wells as custom, user-defined backlogs.