Default permissions and access levels for Azure Boards
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As a member of an Azure Boards project, you can use most features to track work. Limitations to select features are based on the access level and security group to which a user is assigned. The Basic access level and higher supports full access to all Azure Boards features. Stakeholder access level provides partial support to select features, allowing users to view and modify work items, but not use all features. The built-in security groups—Readers, Contributors, and Project Administrators—and team administrator role grant permissions to specific features.
In the tables provided in this article, a ✔️ indicates that the corresponding access level or security group has access to a feature by default.
Note
Team administrators can configure settings for their team's tools. Organization owners and members of the Project Administrators group can configure settings for all teams.
For a comparison chart of Stakeholder versus Basic access, see the Feature matrix. To assign or change an access level, see Add users and assign licenses. If you need to grant specific users select permissions, you can do so.
Work item feature access
You can use work items to track anything you need to track. To learn more, see Understand how work items are used to track issues, tasks, and epics.
Task or permission
Readers
Contributors
Project admins
View work items in this node (Area Path permission)
✔️
✔️
✔️
Edit work items in this node (Area Path permission)
✔️
✔️
Create tag definition
✔️
✔️
Email work items
✔️
✔️
✔️
Delete and restore work items (Project-level permission) (able to restore from the Recycle bin)
✔️
✔️
Permanently delete work items (Project-level permission)
✔️
✔️
✔️
Note
Work items are subject to rules applied to them. Conditional rules based on user or group membership are cached for your web browser. If you find yourself restricted to update a work item, you may have encountered one of these rules. If you believe you've encountered an issue that doesn't apply to you, see Work item form IndexDB caching issues. To learn more about conditional rules, see Rules and rule evaluation.
Boards feature access
Boards present work items as cards and support quick status updates through drag-and-drop.
Task
Readers
Contributors
Team admins
Project admins
View boards and open work items
✔️
✔️
✔️
Add work items to a board; update status, reorder, or reparent child items through drag-and-drop; update a field on a card
✔️
✔️
Add child items to a checklist
✔️
✔️
Assign to a sprint (from card field)
✔️
✔️
Configure board settings
✔️
Backlogs features access
Backlogs display work items as lists. A product backlog represents your project plan and a repository of all the information you need to track and share with your team. Portfolio backlogs allow you to group and organize your backlog into a hierarchy.
Task
Readers
Contributors
Team admins
Project admins
View backlogs and open work items
✔️
✔️
✔️
Add work items to a backlog
✔️
✔️
Use bulk edit features
✔️
✔️
Add child items to a backlog item; prioritize or reorder a backlog; parent items using the Mapping pane; Assign items to a sprint using drag-and-drop
✔️
✔️
Configure team settings, backlog levels, show bugs, work days off
✔️
Sprints feature access
Sprints provide a filtered view of work items that a team has assigned to specific iteration paths or sprints.
Task
Readers
Contributors
Team admins Project admins
Add work items to a sprint backlog or taskboard
✔️
✔️
Prioritize/reorder a sprint backlog or taskboard; add child items to a backlog item; reassign items to a sprint using the Planning pane
✔️
✔️
View team capacity and work details
✔️
✔️
Set team capacity
✔️
✔️
Use bulk edit features
✔️
✔️
Define team sprints
✔️
Queries and semantic search
Queries are filtered lists of work items based on criteria that you define by using a query editor.
Tip
By default, Contributors can't create and save shared queries. We recommend that Project Administrators create a query folder for each team and give the team administrators or the team group query permissions to manage their folder. You need Delete permissions to rename or move a shared query or folder, and Contribute permissions for the folder where you move the query to. To learn more, see Set permissions on queries and query folders.
Task
Readers
Contributors
Project admins
Create and save managed My queries, query charts
✔️
✔️
✔️
Create, delete, and save Shared queries, charts, folders
✔️
Stakeholder access
Stakeholder access supports business owners. It also supports analysts and other team members who don't manage the work of a project, but need to view and add ideas to the backlog, add context and information to work items, and review status and progress. All members of an organization who don't use Visual Studio but want to contribute to work item tracking and monitor progress can be assigned as a stakeholder. Note, even if you change the permission level for a user assigned Stakeholder access, the user will be blocked from accessing the feature.