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Azure DevOps Services
What Is Azure DevOps Services?
DevOps package that simplifies software development via source code and package control, testing, and apps deployment automation. Azure DevOps Services includes Azure Boards, Azure Pipelines, Azure Repos, Azure Test Plans, Azure Artifacts, and more.
Who Uses Azure DevOps Services?
Designed for small to large businesses, it is a DevOps solution that assists with prioritization, portfolio management, release management, and more.
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Azure DevOps Services
Reviews of Azure DevOps Services
Alternatives Considered:
A fantastic offering for small development teams
Comments: We've improved a number of key workflows with Azure DevOps and it's proved to be an invaluable addition to our software development cycle.
Pros:
The service provides a lot under the one package, task management, source control, CI/CD, and release pipelines. If you are a small team or just starting off, you'll be able to take advantage of it all for either free, or very little money. It's clearly designed to get teams hooked on Azure and it does this job well.
Cons:
The UI is clunky in places, task management specifically leaves a lot to be desired. While the close integration with source control is fantastic, editing and navigating between tasks take far too long and you're much more likely to avoid doing it or take a lot longer to complete a simple job.
It is a very complete continuous learning program
Comments: It has been an experience more good than bad, we believe that it is a program that deserves to be purchased, to be used, it has several strong aspects when developing or at least complements the work that had already been done and provides new configurations when developing. Compatibility with many applications.
Pros:
It is a program that helps us obtain better ideas when generating new projects within the company. It was crucial for the team to have access to new learning tools and we believe that we were able to obtain this at the time that helped us make development compatible. with other formats. Azure DevOps provides robust continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities, which are crucial for modern software development in our team and in this way we have complemented work with what we already had.
Cons:
We did not like the project manager system that we believe is outdated, it does not have all the tools that we need, therefore in this sense we had to choose to buy other programs that would help us separately with this problem.
ADO - work management quality
Comments: As a certified Scrum Master, I'm incredibly pleased with ADO and all it's been able to do in supporting our work management. This includes reporting out on progress, cycle times, velocity, and items not in good order.
Pros:
Azure DevOps, or ADO, is the tool we rely on for all of our work management. Thanks to ADO, we can sustain clarity on which team members are prioritizing which deliverables during any given Sprint Cycle. This greatly enhances our ability to achieve intended Outcomes.
Cons:
ADO can have limitations, such as with how dynamic roadmaps can appear and integration with PowerBI for more advanced dashboard metrics. (e.g. how long a work item has been in a particular state)
A basic functional Review
Comments:
Overall experience is neutral.
Looking forward if they improve the product.
Pros:
The software has many advantages - 1. Complete bundle/package to push a build on production. 2.Can keep all the builds/production code with versioning. 3.Bug, User story, accès rights are very well segregated. 4. From assigning a new user story to making a task and assigning bug the process is complete, you do not need any other software to manage the team. 5.Can be easily integrated with GitHub too(if you have paid version of both) 6.Security wise a good and trustable product.
Cons:
There are some cons too which I felt- 1. Firstly the azure dashboard takes too long to load/ refresh (without any wifi/internet issue). 2. Many times it just stuck on a single page. 3. As they are providing a complete package of multiple functionality , the smooth user interface is missing. Literally many times you just have to search for a single things and you will be puzzled in the complete dashboard. 4.If you have a lot of number of projects ongoing and you are part of a big project with multiple members, the user story is not very clear. 5. Options of "not replicable" and many options are missing in bug lifecycle. They should add more lifecycle to task and bugs for better clarity.
A terrific management and reporting service
Comments: It's incredible useful both for project managers and team members to clearly see the progress of tickets throughout a project's lifetime, and keeping track of testing progress.
Pros:
There are so many features, from managing project tasks to test suites to project retrospectives. Creating flexible queries is also a massive help
Cons:
The user interface can be difficult to use at times
Alternatives Considered:
Tools for doubling productivity
Comments: Many plugins and events, such as git repository updates, can be triggered to run builds and tests automatically. By continuously building and testing, it is possible to detect deviations and defects early and improve the quality and efficiency of development.
Pros:
The functionality can be extended with add-ons; since there are many add-ons, you can do a wide range of things. Being able to do certain things even when engineers are not present also helps to keep the product running stably.
Cons:
I would be happy if the manual to consult when I don't understand the operation is a little more complete.
Top end quality
Comments: Very flat learning curve means that everybody can start working with it right from the start, learning more complex things along the way. As a developer you have better things to do than to learn yet another new product that should just be there to support the "real" work (developing). Devops is perfect from that perspective.
Pros:
Devops is not just devops... it's total devops. A whole suite of things from release management, build automation, time management, ticketing, scrum and task boarding to source repository. I don't think anything is left out. It's all very much connected, which means for instance that creating a new branche can become a new ticket that is automatically placed on a task board etc.
Cons:
I don't think anything is missing, but at some points it's not very intuitive. I still have to search every time to get to specific features of my build and release configuration. Security features are very good, but there too I find myself trying to understand how it works every time again.
Alternatives Considered:
Great
Comments: The ability to manage your CI/CD pipeline, your repository, your pull requests and your issues all in one place has made devops very enjoyable to use. It feels like a more mature version of Github.
Pros:
- Pull Requests and Pipelines work very well together. Setting up a branch policies to depend on certain pipelines is very easy. - You can copy any image and past it in any text box, and devops will automatically upload and convert it to an image URL
Cons:
- The inconsistent text composition can be very frustrating. Markdown should be supported everywhere, but it's only available in Pull Requests. - Debugging failing CI builds can be difficult. As far as I know, there's no way to ssh into a container to diagnose the issue. Your only option is to update the yml and hope it works.
Microsoft's one stop shop for planning, task, code, versions and releases management
Comments: If I get a say in the selection of tooling before starting the project, Azure DevOps is my go to.
Pros:
It's a full suite usable directly as is with very little configuration needed to get a jump start. Customizations and integrations are still possible though. I like the work experience better with Azure DevOps board rather than one of the competing backlog/task management suites.
Cons:
The Azure DevOps Boards seems a bit forgotten/sunsetting tool but hopefully there would be still future new features and enhancements to make it even better.Git approvals workflow really should be much more seamless so that either work from developer and approver perspective is only done in Git and automatically reflects to Azure DevOps tasks/work items. Or other way around, approval requests would get populated as task on board and moving it to done column would automatically approve pull request in Git. There is some still unlocked potential there with integration and seamless working experience.
Product development in one place
Comments: Azure DevOps services helps individuals like developers, QA, Product owners to track the progress of the product on a single page. Once does not have to hop on to the multiple tools / software's to track the product progress.
Pros:
One of the best tool for the organizations who follows agile methodologies. Azure DevOps services makes product/software development easy with its user friendly and everything in one place feature. One can priorities the backlogs in Azure Boards and implement the CICD pipelines in Azure pipelines with integrated Git repository.
Cons:
Sometimes the connection to the Azure DevOps server slows down the response. Azure boards can be improved in terms of user interface like other ticketing tools.
Agrxis Review on Azure DevOps Services
Comments: My overall impression of Azure DevOps Services has been favorable. The platform provides a full range of tools and capabilities for project management and team collaboration. I value the degree of customization offered by the platform since it enables me to modify my workflows to match the unique requirements of my projects. The seamless and useful interfaces with other Microsoft tools and services have also helped me to streamline my work and be more productive. Although the platform is undoubtedly sophisticated, I have found the documentation and community resources to be useful in getting past any roadblocks or difficulties I may have faced.
Pros:
Since I've been utilizing Azure DevOps Services, I must admit that I'm impressed with how it has benefited my team and I as we work on development projects. The feature set of this service that caters to numerous facets of software development, such as project planning, code management, testing, deployment, and monitoring, is what I value the most.When it comes to facilitating smooth communication and coordination between team members, including those who operate remotely, Azure DevOps Services' collaboration tools are very beneficial. We can organize activities and monitor progress effectively thanks to the agile boards' and backlogs' intuitiveness and usability.It's also great that Azure DevOps Services enables continuous integration and deployment, which makes it simpler for us to automate our software delivery pipeline and deliver new features and upgrades on schedule. Additionally, troubleshooting reports and prioritizing capabilities come in handy for quickly detecting and fixing issues as they arise.
Cons:
Despite my appreciation for the variety of features and capabilities provided by Azure DevOps Services, I have occasionally seen documentation that is deficient or ambiguous, making it challenging to debug problems or comprehend how particular features operate. Despite these difficulties, I continue to think of Azure DevOps Services as a useful tool for organizing my projects and working with my team.
Must Have Source Control
Comments: Since our company has started using VSTS, I found it very helpful and it has made our work so much easier. We can now all work on the same project at the same time, we have our pipelines and builds going well, so deployments are no longer such a huge concern in terms of reliability and roll-back capability. There is much that I still have to learn, but from what I have experienced so far, I will not use any other version control system.
Pros:
Having recently started working with VSTS, I found it capable of so much in terms of version control, continuous integration and also project management(Yes Project Management). The idea of having everything you need in one place, has always been a challenge in many teams. With VSTS DevOps, everyone knows what is happening, from management, to developers, to project managers. You can see exactly what was changed, by whom and when. Project managers can plan and allocate tasks to developers and track their progress. Other than the version control and tracking of progress, continuous integration and delivery enables a seamless link from dev to staging to production and everything in between. VSTS is indeed a powerful tool that not many can compete with.
Cons:
I find it a bit difficult to navigate through. Due to the large scope of functionality, I find myself with too much info at times. From your menu to the left, it branches out to so many different pages.
Dev Ops is a must to meet deliverables
Comments: Overall, I would highly recommend this product especially if your organization already uses Microsoft. The integration to other Microsoft products/services is seamless. Being able to connect to your companies active directory and not have to hassle with a user database is a huge plus.
Pros:
As with all other Microsoft products the best part is how easily they all integrate together. Being able to get up and running quickly using an active directory is also a plus. Notifications, workflow, resource management, task assigning, planning sprints, storing document. This tool literally does it all and chances are that if you have an enterprise license with Microsoft you can get this up and running quickly.
Cons:
Planning sprints is a bit of a tedious process. I wouldn't necessarily say this is a con because I dont know if there is a way to change that. Maybe if Dev Ops could make a bulk upload feature or something. Like where you could load a csv file to plan out everything?
One Stop Solution for all DevOps needs
Comments: All in all, I found Azure DevOps Services very useful. It has some of the great features which i have been using daily. It helps me to collaborate with colleagues, track working items, plan sprints, Source code management and Continuous integration/deployment of builds.
Pros:
Azure DevOps Services offers various features, I'm using Pipelines(CI/CD), Artifacts, Boards and Repositories mostly. All of the features are very well developed and easy to use. Intensive documentation is offered by Microsoft to learn more about platform's features. Board helps me to track work items. Repositories helps to do peer programming and Pipelines helps to build automatically and deploy. It's integration with other tools like Sonarqube, Ansible and Jenkins are not that hard as well.
Cons:
If some of the features comes with learning curve. Apart from that, Microsoft hosted agent pools has its own limitation they are not very useful if we have some special requirements for our project.
Alternatives Considered:
Azure DevOps
Pros:
Great tool for agile software development. We used azure devops to manage our user stories and bugs with Scrum, had our repositories and source control there too. Also the fact that there are plenty of addons (for ex. "Estimate") for it makes azure great tool. Also it is free for 5 users
Cons:
There are some minor bugs and this bugs take too much time to be resolved. Customer support isn't great
An unmissable part of the Application Lifecycle Management
Comments: As a DevOps engineeer I help a group of teams with there Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). Team Foundation Server (TFS) is an unmissible part in the ALM setup. TFS is very customizable, and you can fast add new projects to the lifecycle to to TFS
Pros:
ease of use clear architecture quick setup easy to customize. From dashboards, to custom Build tasks. Very good at helping you prevent legacy. For example we have over 200 build definitions. These are very good manageable due to the use of Task Groups. Integration with Git version control is first class
Cons:
We don't use the Release module of Team Foundation Server because it misses a lot of features compared to Octopus Deploy
Highly effective service for maintaining code repository, build & release activity
Comments: It becomes very easy to track and monitor all the project level activities from one platform. Ensures the code quality and continuous integration very effective.
Pros:
It is very easy to configure the CI-CD pipelines to make the release build pipelines. Maintaining the efficient code repositories to ease the code management activities. It ensures the different boards for maintaining the different boards across the organization.
Cons:
Some of the best services like Time Tracking and Event based triggers are still not included in this product as we need to import it as extensions.
Devops with Azure Devops
Comments: Better quality of Software, Faster delivery times, automated feedback loops and validation times. Wins all round for different departments.
Pros:
-Build and release pipelines -integrated git repositories -Notifications -Tasks market place -Automated testing and result dashboards on each release Since implementing we have removed almost all manual processes, speeding up delivery times and quality of our products.
Cons:
Some tasks on the marketplace our out of date and dont work, have to be careful what you install and use within a pipeline.
Azure DevOps Services - Project Tracker
Comments: Overall, it is a good tool for assigning the task and tracking the project status of the team members.
Pros:
Using Azure DevOps Services, we can easily assign a task to team members and track their activity.It has a user-friendly interface that everyone can use. The main advantage of this tool is to store the code in different versions. We can easily create stories and subtasks.
Cons:
The main drawback of this tool is that it is very hard to understand its advanced configuration. It is difficult to give access to the team members because of its cost.
Full platform supporting agile teams
Pros:
Ironic that the company has moved onto VSTS and theres a lot of support online with regards to being an end user. Setup will always be more work for tech teams deploying the product. VSTS has allowed our project teams to analyse business cases running through the full agile process up until allowing QA to set up and start virtualized environments through VSTS. Amazing product which works well with opensource libraries as well when deploying test environments.
Cons:
Being part of the set up team resulted in a few late nights however once deployed to local servers and set up correctly, it is a breeze. Initial support is still fairly new so a team of DevOps engineers is required to troubleshoot installations and configs.
Alternatives Considered:
unique pipelines
Comments: automation made easy with CI/CD.
Pros:
I like the fact that every release to the main branch has to go through levels of approval by a senior Developer before it can be finally released to production.
Cons:
Codes shouldn't be allowed to run directly from GitHub, it should be initiated directly from Azure Repos. I mean Azure Repos should be very unique.
A reliable devops tool for our development team
Comments: overall this is a grate SAAS for DevOps, our development team relies on it in day-to-day operations.
Pros:
The CI\CD process is straightforward, easy to use and setup.
Cons:
the project management function is not as good as other competitors, so our team did not move our project management part into it.
Slow at times
Comments: I am currently operating as a technical team lead with a very distributed team across the US and latin America. This really is a brilliant tool for centralizing the operations of a technology company.
Pros:
I do like how integrated all the Microsoft services are. Allows for a seamless experience between project management and actual development services.
Cons:
I dislike the slow responses and page loads - I am almost sure that a number of the screens could be preloaded to make it faster and more responsive
Feature Rich
Pros:
VSTS provides everything our team needs to manage our work, code, continuous integration, and deployment. In the past, i would have 1 or 2 people dedicated to building and maintaining the tools the VSTS provides.
Cons:
I wish there was better integration with non microsoft tools like Slack.
VSTS is becoming a full fledged management tool
Pros:
The think I like the most about this is how everything is integrated. The code that is checked in is tied to the peer review and the feature it is for, which can be tied to the build it was in, which can be tied to the release that went out. This allows all work to be tracked along the entire software development life cycle.
Cons:
The thing that is still lacking are project management tools. However this is something that is continually being worked on and the feature set that exists now is much more robust than what it was a year ago. I expect this to quickly catch up to some of the other tools out there.