In development

Azure Boards can't add two fields together.

It can copy a field and it can clear one — but it cannot sum two. Work Item Rules will add computed fields and conditional tags, using the formula syntax your team already knows from Excel.

Not finished, not available

This is being built. It is not on the marketplace, it cannot be installed, and there is nothing to buy. This page describes what it is for and how it will work — nothing on it is an offer.

Calculated field

[Total Hours]
  ← [Hours - Analysis]
  + [Hours - Development]

Calculated fields

Microsoft's own documented answer to summing two custom fields is to export a query to Excel and write a macro. Work Item Rules will evaluate the formula on the work item instead — arithmetic, IF(), ROUND, MIN and MAX, string handling, and date arithmetic between date fields.

IF([Work Item Type] = "Bug", [Estimate] * 1.5, [Estimate])
DATEDIFF([Target Date], [Start Date])
CONCAT([Area Path], " / ", [Priority])

Conditional tags

tag "urgent" when [Priority] <= 1

The tag goes on when the condition becomes true and comes off when it stops being true. Native rules cannot do this: a set-value rule replaces the entire tag list, so it would wipe out everything else on the item.

Nothing will run on our servers

Azure DevOps gives extensions no background compute, so there is nothing running server-side. Values are calculated on the open form, and items converge as they are opened.

Your work item data and your rules will stay in your Azure DevOps organisation. Rules are stored in the extension data service inside your own org, and the extension makes no calls to any external service — including ours.

A deliberate limitation

There will be no TODAY() function, which is a decision rather than an omission. A stored "days since X" value would be correct on the day it was written and quietly wrong afterwards, since nothing recalculates an item nobody opens.

When it is ready

We would rather say nothing than promise a date we might miss, so there is not one here yet. If this is a gap you are living with today, get in touch and tell us what you need it to do — that genuinely shapes what gets built first.