I am not affiliated with Microsoft, with any of their offerings, or employees. This post is my perspective.
Developing an application is more than just code. It involves organizational process, division of labor, and the careful implementation of requirements. To manage this, some teams use multiple suites of tools, frameworks, rules, methodologies, the list goes on…
Azure DevOps gives you a suite of tools, they call “dev services”. Let’s go through them:
- Dashboards – View metrics about your developed applications
- Boards / Items / Backlog / Sprints – A place for you and your team to plan and assign work
- Repos – Store your application code repositories (Git driven)
- Pipelines – Automated build and deployments from your repositories to cloud platforms / infrastructure
- Test Plans – Paid test manager extension…
- Artifacts – Fully integrated package management (private libraries of software)
Assign work items to others on your team, track State (Started) and Reason (Work started), Assign priority, effort/actual hours, assign a Work Branch from a Repo, and Relate it to other issues. Using BitBucket daily for work, I found it to be a relatively painless switch to the overall UI.
I cannot seem to find a way to view all issues. You also cannot update issues in a large table grid view. You can batch update, which requires you to enter a separate view (BitBucket is no better!).
Users can take their issue branches and make pull requests, offering teams with the ability to peer review code before merging to the baseline (master branch). One can manage version of the software via Tags.
To deploy your applications, you can use a suite of ready made templates. There are a wealth of choices. Docker, Node, Yaml, .Net, Android, and so many more. You can even create your own pipeline by following these instructions.
Let’s hope their feature request system is improved and receives backing from Microsoft. Because, I think this could be an awesome extension to Azure.
Featured image: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/devops/