Modifying Existing Task Groups with the Minimal Impact to Existing Pipelines

Azure DevOps task group is used to group and manage multiple pipeline tasks as a reusable component. While you are working in your projects, there can be requirements to edit existing task group. But, if you directly edit the task group, multiple pipelines get affected by the changes. So, This blog explains how to edit a task group with minimum affect to the existing pipelines.

Prerequisites: 

• Azure DevOps task group use in a pipeline

Let's get started.

Go to Azure DevOps task group section and select a task group. Do changes to the task group and save task group as draft.

Now you have two task groups, Original task group and the draft version of task group with the recent changes.

Then, you can do further changes to draft version while original task group is being used in the existing pipelines. Once you completed the modifications, you can publish the draft task group as preview version. Click on the Publish draft and you would be able to see the popup. Select the publish as preview check box and publish the task group as preview.

Now you have a  preview version of the task group. You can add a preview version of a task group to a pipeline and test the preview version  before publishing as the final version. Once preview task group is ready to be published, click on publish preview.

Once published the task group, new version will get added to the version list.

This blog explained how to modify existing task group without affecting the existing pipelines.