Introduction to Bravo Notes for Azure DevOps

Quick start

Introduction

Bravo Notes is a product to help you create and distribute information about the software you build using content from work items in Azure DevOps.

While release notes is the most obvious use case, Bravo Notes is also used to create and publish other kinds of documents like weekly reports and documentation.

How it works

At the core Bravo Notes works like this

• work items are loaded in one of multiple ways
• work items are categorized / labeled via user defined rules (e.g. Bugfixes, New Features)
• a user defined template is used to render work item data
• either a markdown, HTML or PDF document is generated

Bravo Notes offers a variety of options and a powerful template syntax that gives you full control over the structure of the final document.

Ways to integrate Bravo Notes in your process

Bravo Notes is used in two ways.

Manually generate documents via the Bravo Notes UI

A common scenario for manually generating release notes might look like this:

• Titles, descriptions and custom fields of work items resolved in the current release get some final edits
• A new Bravo Notes document is duplicated from a past release
• Work items resolved in the current release are added to the document using a custom query
• The [Export] feature is used to generate and download a HTML and a PDF version of the release notes

Automatically generate documents as part of a build / release pipeline

A common scenario for manually generating release notes might look like this:

• Titles, descriptions and custom fields of work items resolved in the current release get some final edits as part of the current software release
• A build definition is triggered
• The previously configured Bravo Notes document is loaded
• Associated work items from the current build are loaded
• A HTML and a PDF document are created in Bravo Notes build tasks
• The generated documents are published to a web server using other build tasks