You have multiple teams that work on multiple projects in Azure DevOps. You need to plan and manage the consumers and producers for each project…

The most effective solution for planning, managing, and visualizing producer/consumer dependencies across multiple projects in Azure DevOps is to use the Dependency Tracker extension. This tool is specifically designed to create and track dependencies between work items, even when they reside in different projects or organizations. It allows teams to explicitly define "producer" (work being depended on) and "consumer" (work that has the dependency) relationships. Crucially, it provides visualizations like dependency graphs and matrices, which fulfill the requirement for an "overview of all the projects."

B. Add a Parent or Child link to the feature or user story for the items of each project.

Parent/Child links are for creating a hierarchical work breakdown structure (e.g., Epic -> Feature), not for tracking producer/consumer dependencies between peer items across teams.

C. Add a Predecessor or Successor link to the feature or user story for the items of each project.

While these links represent a dependency, they are primarily for sequencing tasks. They lack the specific producer/consumer semantics and the advanced cross-project visualization capabilities needed for a high-level overview.

D. Create a custom query to show the consumers and producers and add a widget to a dashboard.

This is not a complete solution. Standard queries and widgets cannot effectively visualize complex dependency chains across projects without a pre-existing mechanism, like the Dependency Tracker, to first create and define these relationships.

1. Microsoft

Azure DevOps Marketplace

Dependency Tracker: "Dependency Tracker is an Azure DevOps extension that helps you manage dependencies across teams

projects

and even organizations. It allows you to create 'Produces For' / 'Consumes From' links between work items... It also provides different visualizations to track dependencies."

Source: Dependency Tracker - Visual Studio Marketplace (Refer to the "Overview" section).

2. Microsoft Learn

Link user stories

issues

bugs

and other work items in Azure Boards: This document details the purpose of different link types. It describes Parent/Child links for "tree topology" and Predecessor/Successor links for "dependency topology

" confirming they are not primarily for managing cross-team producer/consumer models with a high-level overview.

Source: Link user stories

issues

bugs

and other work items in Azure Boards (Refer to the "Link type reference" section).

3. Microsoft Learn

Plan and manage dependencies across teams: This article discusses strategies for managing dependencies. It explicitly recommends the Dependency Tracker extension for complex scenarios: "For more complex dependency tracking

you can use the Dependency Tracker extension."

Source: Plan and manage dependencies across teams - Azure Boards (Refer to the "Dependency Tracker" section).