Effectively managing permissions and access in Azure DevOps is key to ensuring your teams can collaborate efficiently and securely. One of the most powerful tools for this is the use of security groups, which allow you to centrally define and control permissions for users and groups.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore how to leverage security groups in Azure DevOps to streamline user management, assign permissions, and maintain control over your organization’s resources.

Understanding Security Groups in Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps uses security groups to serve a variety of important functions:

  • Determining Permissions: Security groups define the specific permissions allocated to a user or group, controlling what actions they can perform.
  • Controlling Access Levels: Security groups determine the overall access level granted to a user or group, such as whether they have read-only or full contributor permissions.
  • Filtering Work Item Queries: Security group membership can be used to filter the results of work item queries, allowing you to scope data access.
  • Enabling Notifications: Security groups can be mentioned in discussions to send email notifications to their members.
  • Assigning Role-Based Permissions: Security groups can be added to role-based permission assignments, simplifying permission management.
  • Setting Object-Level Permissions: Security groups can be granted permissions to specific objects, resources, or artifacts within Azure DevOps.

Azure DevOps provides both default security groups, such as Readers and Contributors, as well as the ability to create custom security groups tailored to your organization’s needs.

Creating Custom Security Groups

To manage permissions at the project or collection level, you can create custom security groups. This allows you to precisely define the permissions and access granted to specific users or teams.

  1. Project-Level Groups: Create a project-level group when you need to manage permissions for a specific project. This could include things like a “Project Administrators