Azure DevOps Services Reviews

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.

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.

The versatility of this software is immense. It has the ability to track work items using Kanban boards, store code using TFVC/Git, and the ability to automate deployment as per CI/CD for your pipelines.

The learning curve when it comes to the automation part for preexisting legacy process can be a bit difficult to understand and set up

We loved the integration with other Microsoft products such as Microsoft teams. We also found the UI to be snappy and easy to use.

The price and team collaboration tools. In contrast to Trello, we found that there was a larger learning curve involved in getting to learn the software.

If your company is fully invested in the Microsoft product suite, Azure DevOps is the extension of that investment. It allows direct integration with the Cloud Services in Azure for IaC, CaC, and CI/CD code deployments. It also allows the customization for the workflows for Agile, SCRUM, Kanban, etc... to match up with core source control, testing, along with build and release strategies. Its a one stop shop for each of the core disciplines in IT Teams in the ALM process. If you need extensibility to other platforms outside of Azure, the connectors and integration are available to AWS, Google Cloud, On-premise, etc... It allows your teams to work collectively in 1 platform, but use their "own" tools to deliver (i.e. Java, Jenkins, Linux, etc....).

Because the platform has so many connectors and integrations, customization becomes challenging. You need advocates and training to customize the "teams" to standardize and integrate with working patterns. The features being added are more Microsoft oriented than development oriented.

I have most liked the ability to record, track and optimize the processes that go into internal collaboration between developers and projects managers. The ability to track the steps and progress of any development projects and the project hierarchy within the front end interface makes it easy to drill down and view details about any given task in the platform.

The account manager who has been assigned to help us with customer support has not always been responsive and thorough in providing answers to questions that have some complexities. It was not ideal when needing a faster turn around time for specific development and product needs.

1. Easy to use console: Azure ADO console is clean and very easy to use. It offers mutiple services like Azure Boards, Azure Artifacts and Azure Pipeline as well. All there features are pretty solid and packed with the required feature set. Integrations are also available to make sure the end user can use multiple tools at the same time.
2. Azure Boards: also offer Kanban style task tracking which is proven to be one of the best task management tool.

There are no major cons for Azure ADO. It offers all the required feature-set and integrations which is required by any large organisation. API access is also available in case anyone want's to access the services via CLI. We have not observed any lack or disadvantage for Azure ADO so far.

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.

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.

User interface, setting up build processes and release process was quite easier as compared to other devops tools , integration of third party tools was also easy by follow official Microsoft documentation.

Nothing as such as of now, maybe sometimes when multiple people accessing the same task from Azure boards the behaviour is not consistent.

VSTS has been getting progressively better over the years and now boats a pretty impressive set of features including a best-in-breed bug/ticket tracking system, excellent source control support and very good CI build/release pipeline management. While some people still swear by the on-prem TFS for their teams (myself included), I am slowly getting swayed towards cloud-based VSTS

If you rely on VSTS for your code builds you may run into an issue where you are running out of free "build minutes" and will need to purchase more. You may also need to share build hosts with others using VSTS which is very, very annoying. These can also be expanded for a price.

Visual Studio Team Service DevOps is the one of the best move of the Microsoft. Build & release process for continuous integration delivery that work all platform. Version Controlling is having the two option in GIT and TFSVC for managing the code. Tracking on work is also easy and as developer and manager can check their capacity and work backlogs. Custom reporting can also help you preparing charts. VSTS also Test for your code.

The least thing I like in it is not covering the monitoring the aspect under the name of DevOps. As a continues feedback is also very important with corresponding to the development. Build automation should simplify and for release management they should provide recommendation for the best practice to implementation.

I think the best about VSTS is the ability to be able to comment on work items, naming people, so that they are notified of what comments you make. This makes it very agile to cooperate and collaborate with my team. Everyone knows what to do, there is traceability, and, for the first time, all the info we need to work is in a single place. Linking and ordering work items by hierarchy is also a great feature that I really like.

Its a bit hard to get used. There are a few features we are not even using because we do not full understand them. Kanban boards are not that intuitive and we end up using old lists usually. I also find it annoying that I cannot order by columns when looking at a sprint or backlog, I can only do that in queries.

Fully support to scrum's artifacts and processes.
The far away the team is, you reap the benefits of an integrated management tool that offers panels, kanban, and notifications that can not be fixed to the wall.
The investments and ongoing costs are insignificant, given the immediate collaborative environment that it establishes.
No overhead of management tasks, people keep focused in the product development and it reduce work time.

Need improvements in pre-configured reports and dashboards.
Continuous integration and continuous deployment are complex to setup up and keep running.
The control of product backlog items that spend more than one sprint (like Epics) is weak and make you confused as if the work was delayed.

To get up and runnign for the first time when we were a small company with only a few employees was quick and simple. As the team and our needs grew, we were able to scale the TFS/DevOps infrastructure to suite our evolving needs. The capabilities around automating software build/release pipelines can handle tasks of any complexity and are well designed

Many of the features rely on developers putting hour based time estimates in tasks, and we try to estimate at the User Story level with story points, it would be nice to have all the same velocity and burndwown features if only using story points.

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

We don't use the Release module of Team Foundation Server because it misses a lot of features compared to Octopus Deploy

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.

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.

I think the best thing about ADO, at least for me and my needs is visibility. It's very easy to see where a ticket is in its cycle and easy to follow up on things as needed. Other coworkers can check the status of their items which removes the need for constant email check ups.

I'm sure this feature can be turned off (or I could filter my inbox) but I receive a lot of emails about updates on tickets but some of them are unnecessary. I don't need an email to let me know someone liked or thumbed up my comment.

If your organization uses Azure Cloud and other Azure products, this is the right DevOps service for you. Seamless integration and well knit into the stack. Ability wise you can integrate other products too - but needs decent effort.

If your organization is not an Azure shop and you use may be one or 2 products, this is an overkill. You have better equivalent choices in market to pick.

It has all the functions to practice DevOps. It is very to easy to get start and has some free license for trial. I really like the UI.

MS release functions every week and sometimes hard to get update the skill in Azure DevOps. Need to improve the UX.

The best part of this tool is we can plan, prepare and execute using this tool.
Can use CICD pipeline
Developers, Testers, Managers, BA, POs and clients at one place

Nothing least, it's costly comparatively
Need some documentation

1. Integration with github etc
2. CI CD pipeline is easy to setup and manage
3. Task tracking is very helpful
4. Product backlog tracking and creation is very user friendly

1. Can be a bit confusing to new users moving from TFS

You can set up an organization and levels of privilege.

Release pipelines tend to take too long to finish.

You can manage source code, work items (features, tasks, bugs, epics, issues, test cases, user stories), builds, and tests in one application.

Maybe it's configurable and may not be an issue, but I when I do searches in source code, it finds code in master branches only.

it is easy to use
feature are very useful for team to track userstory hours and status

many time getting hang and not responding as it should be but overall it is best in Market

The dashboard and the filters are very helpful, there are updates and developments that help my team in managing our system progress.

Logging a ticket has many mandatory fields to fill

Easily scalable, free for small teams, provides build agents for you. Lots of solutions on marketplace, different VCS supported

For those who is sick on security, keeping the code and projects in a cloud could be a problem.