Automatically closing your backlog tickets due to inactivity in Azure Dev Ops

In my previous post, I shared couple of thoughts about automatically closing backlog items due to inactivity. Check it out if you are curious why in the first place I was even thinking of setting this up in my project.

I generally agree that lazy people make for good software engineers. Yes exactly so! So lazy that a sheer thought of having to perform the same boring activity ever again, makes them want to automate… Everything!

In my case that ever burning need to automate all of those mundane tasks is only curbed by this xkcd comic that keeps reminding me that it just might not always be the most prudent course of action.

Initially when I had this idea for the first time, I checked out existing extensions in Visual Studio Marketplace quitely hoping such feature would be a button click away. Sadly, I haven’t found anything that could remotely satisfy my use case. Afterwards I hurled one more rushed search query into google and after not finding anything that would solve my problem out of the box I concluded that probably the time investment in my case would not be worth it.

I came back to this again when the backlog pruning became even more burdensome on my part, and at that point my perception of the time investment didn’t look so bad anmore. Especially when I realised that I don’t even need to develop my own extension to achieve what I want…

I ended up writing a quick and dirty script that would run periodically in Azure Pipelines, that would in the end make maintaining the whole backlog much easier and sustainable.

You can find the code I wrote below: