Azure DevOps is Microsoft provided service to provide version control, reporting, project management, build and release management service. It can be Azure hosted (online) or on-premise. It covers the entire application cycle and enables DevOps capabilities. Check Microsoft documentation to learn more about Azure DevOps.
Recently I was working on a Project to write some custom integration with our existing ITSM service and Azure DevOps. I think it is very common in many Organizations to have an ITSM system to track all activities performed by different Teams, where as, a section of Teams, mostly, Developers, Testers, Cloud Engineer groups etc. prefer to track activities using some sort of Agile Methodologies using some DevOps tools. In my Project, it was Azure DevOps and ServiceNow as the ITSM system.
Based on above requirements, I wanted to add a Custom field in Azure DevOps work item to provide a reference to the ServiceNow Ticket. I will provide a detailed automation process and script to do this integration in another blog very soon.
For this blog, I will add a Custom field called “ITSM Ticket” for work items in Azure DevOps. Goal is to write Incident number for the corresponding Task and Change Request number for the corresponding User story.
Login to Azure DevOps with your credentials.
Once you are inside your Organization. Select the Project which will already has the work item type to add the custom field. For this example, it is Task.
From the left action bar select “Board” and then click on “Work items” to go to the list of existing work items.
Now, for this example, we will use an existing Task to add the custom field. If you don’t have any Task already listed, create a new Task. Now, click on the Task number to open it in Azure DevOps. If you notice, our Custom field is not there as of now.
To add our Custom field click on the there dots at right of the screen 
and click on the “Customize” link as shown in the screenshot below.
You will receive a pop-up window to select the process for integration. For my project, I am using Agile process(It was set during the creation of the Project).
In Process settings page click on “New Field”
Click on “Create a field”. Add required information, like , Name of the field, data type, description etc as shown in the screenshot and click on “Add field” button.
You may also set the option to make this field as “Required” if you want so.
Once the field is added successfully, it should be visible as shown in the screenshot.
Now, check the existing Task or create a new and you should see the field visible in the form.
You can always go back and hide or delete the field, if you think you don’y need it.
I hope this post will help you on creating and managing Custom field in Azure DevOps for your Organization. I will post a script on integrating ServiceNow with Azure DevOps soon. With that, an work item will be created in Azure DevOps from a ServiceNow Ticket with all required details updated in the work item. I might come up with another blog on updating ServiceNow Ticket with changes made in Azure DevOps. Stay tuned 🙂 and Happy scripting!