Close all overdue Azure DevOps work items with Python

As software engineers, we need to track our work items even if we are working as freelancers or for an enterprise. Those work items constitute the health of the project also helping the management to understand the high-level view. Every company has its own ALM software to track the work. One of the famous ALM is Azure DevOps (ADO hereafter) from Microsoft.

Problem

In an ideal situation, we should plan our tasks for every day. Good if we can plan in advance and close the work items as soon as it's done. But sometimes we may not be able to make the ADO work items sync with reality. It may be due to long release days. Unexpected support issues, shortage of team members, etc. At the end of the billing cycle finance department will be chasing us to close work items. At that time closing each and every item manually is time-consuming. There are many ways to tackle it such as import to Excel close all and sync. We may use any no-code low-code platforms such as Power Automate to automate the task. Developers who use those platforms normally called 'citizen developers'. I strongly recommend trying any of these methods to automate this type of work. There is no need to code.

The no-code, low-code platforms generally offer building blocks to do simple day-to-day operations then provide extensibility via plug-ins or by invoking web requests / Web APIs. The plug-ins require coding efforts. Invoking web requests needs deep knowledge of Web APIs and how the service is structured.

Potential solution

As developers, we are proud of our programming ability and may not want to become citizen developers. For those, there are SDKs available to automate Azure DevOps work items. Also when the no-code, low-code platform doesn't have required customizations, we have to use the SDKs or make direct Web API calls to Azure Dev Ops.

We can use the Python SDK given by Azure DevOps as one of the mediums to interact with Azure Dev Ops to close all the OverDue work items.

Code is available on GitHub.

How to use is already documented in the readme.md files. Please follow that.

Code walkthrough

The Git Repo has enough comments. I am also planning a YouTube video explaining the same.