Azure DevOps Services Reviews

My favorite is that their API can be used to do almost anything in the GUI, we use it heavily to store values across pipelines. The other option we use a lot is secure files for our certs, ssh keys and other text files containing important information which is encrypted and not output in clear test. Another thing that I like about Azure DevOps is that you can use it with any of the products that are on the market we use it heavily with Ansible to the point that we are able to get Ansible-tower like functionality without the extra license. Every day the community makes it easier by adding tasks to simplify working with inputs and outputs for example Terraform state file management, Ansible secrets, Packer Image Builder, etc. I can go on and on but the other major integration is with Security where we can scan our code at the time we commit and before running on our pipelines.

I cannot find a specific con but I can see alerts about service availability about once per month but hasn't affected my usability.

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.

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.

The best thing about Azure DevOps is that it is natively integrated and connected to all of your other Azure cloud resources and it makes it easy to manage and govern you infrastructure because they are all inside Azure. It has all kinds of templates for your various software platforms to enable you build and deploy your code from Azure hosted source control into Azure services for your customers.

Sometimes the build machines can be slow, you need to bring your own build machines and setting your own build machines can be complicated. The Git aspect of the Azure DevOps is also not as smooth as other competitions in the market like Github, but it is very extensible.

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.

There is a ton of features.
They just did a new design and rebranded it.
You can set automatic builds to test your code.
It allows for organized planning through the Boards section.
There is easy integration with Azure Cloud.
It allows use of either Git or TFVC.

With all of the features, it's easy to get lost.
Settings and security seems to be all over the place, so it's hard to track down the setting you need.
There's a learning curve if you haven't used VSTS or TFS before.

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.

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.

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.

I find the sprint planning features, dashboard and sprint boards intuitive and convenient. I like being able to organize my tickets and easily see the work of other members of my team.

I am not a huge fan of the test planning aspect of the program. I find creating test cases to be clunky, even when using the "grid" functionality that allows you to import test cases from a spreadsheet. One example is that when creating a test case using the "grid" feature, if you had multiple line breaks within a single cell in a spreadsheet, it will copy each line break into a separate cell in the grid instead of copying them into a single cell with line breaks as they appeared in the spreadsheet.

It's a one-stop shop for everything you need in an R&D group - includes everything, with integration between the different features of the product.

It doesn't have the best integrations around (especially vs. GitHub for example), and also the task management system feels clunky at times - more old fashioned than alternatives like Monday.com or Asana, which makes it annoying to check up on my work daily as an IC.

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.