Likelihood to Recommend Azure DevOps is good to use if you are all-in on the Microsoft Azure stack. It's fully integrated across Azure so it is a point-and-click for most of what you will need to achieve. If you are new to Azure make sure you get some outside experience to help you otherwise it is very easy to overcomplicate things and go down the wrong track, or for you to manually create things that come out of the box.
Read full review How many users will be using the system? What part of the organization will own the product? Serena is a great workflow tool. It can be tailored to fit in any scenario and so I dont believe there is any situation where it would be inappropriate.
Read full review Pros Reporting Integration- Azure boards provides Kanban and other dashboard, their templates for easy management of project. Project Pipeline- easy integration and development of CI/CD pipelines, helped in testing, releasing project artifacts. Version Control- Integration with Git and code IDE made it easy to share, review our code, fix bugs and do testing. Read full review One of my favorite capabilities within the Serena user interface is the reporting. Detailed searches into the workflows allow the users to create reports containing any field that is in the workflow. Users here use the reporting during review time to pull metrics on tickets they have worked during the year. From a process perspective, the system provides a specific report with details around how long the items have been in various states. I use this information to measure my process peformance and to identify bottlenecks within the processes themselves. The reports are fairly easy to use but they can also be very complex too. Reports can be set up and shared across groups. Generic reports can also be set up so that query at run time fields can be entered. Developing new processes in Serena Business Manager is relatively easy and does not necessarily need to be done by a developer. Serena has added some key features that reduces the need to add Java scripts. Serena Business Manager is a blank slate and it can be as complex or as simple as you make it. The forms are the same. I have seen some very simple designs and some very complex and beautiful form designs. From a user perspective, it is fairly simple to just pick up and start using. I introduce our new hires to the systems in a thirty minute session. Most users are more confused by which process to use for what than by how to use the system. Read full review Cons Can add more build templates for specific technology requirements Can have more features in dashboards which can help dev teams stream line their tasks and priorities Can have raise alarm feature in case of any sort of failure in devops pipeline execution Read full review Serena's documentation for the product is well written but it can be a bit challenging because it is often missing key components, best practices or tips and tricks that you get when you call into their customer support. It is also very frustrating to have their release notes refer back to their knowledge base to have their customers figure out what they fixed in their releases. Serena Business Manager manages their users in an Administrator function. Any changes made in this part of Serena is only logged in the database. It would be nice to have some reporting out of of this system. When you have multiple administrators of a system, it would be a nice feature to have some reporting here rather than having to go into the database. The notification feature within Serena can be a bit challenging and time consuming. You can't copy the notifications so if you want to duplicate a notification you had previously created you have to recreate it again. The notifications have three levels to them and they can be a bit tricky to get them to work just right. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Because we are a Microsoft Gold Partner we utilize most of their software and we have so much invested in Team Foundation Server now it would take a catastrophic amount of time and resources to switch to a different product.
Read full review Usability Azure DevOps Server or TFS is a complete suite in itself. From Developer's machine where the code is developed to the production environment where the code is meant to run it take care of complete flow within itself. It acts as a code repository you can check-in check-out codes using GIT interface. It also acts as a Build and Automation Test tool which can help you to judge sanctity of your code. It further acts as a release manager to deploy your application to the production environment. And all these steps can also be performed without any manual intervention with the option to have approval processes. Hence its a perfect blend of all set of tools and capabilities required to bring code to production.
Read full review Support Rating I have not had to use the support for Azure DevOps Server. There have never been any issues where I was not able to figure it out or quickly resolve. Our Scrum Master has used support before though, and the service has always been prompt and clear with a customer-focus
Read full review Implementation Rating Do research beforehand and, if possible, do a trial run before implementing into production environment.
Read full review Alternatives Considered In my opinion, DevOps covers the development process end to end way better than
Jira or
GitHub . Both competitors are nice in their specific fields but DevOps provides a more comprehensive package in my opinion. It is still crazy to see that the whole suite can be used for free. The productivity increase we realized with DevOps is worth real money!
Read full review We have been using Serena for eight years and I don't believe I can answer this question since it was so long ago that we made the decision to purchase Serena.
Read full review Return on Investment It has streamlined the pipeline and project management for our agile effort. It has helped our agile team get organized since that is a new methodology being leveraged within the Enterprise. The calendar has improved visibility into different OOOs across the project team since we all come from different departments across the larger organization. Read full review We use Serena to standardize our business processes to ensure a more efficient work day experience for our employees. By having the employees use Serena for the processes we can ensure the process is completed the same way every time. By having our key processes in Serena we are able to measure our processes at any time. Some of those key metrics include a 90% reduction in rework and a 47% reduction in overall process time. With the ability to measure processes at any time, we can react to process problems and correct them quickly. Serena Business Manager is flexible enough to allow quick development and rapid promotion when necessary. Serena is very ingrained in our culture and the culture has taken on the "ticket" mentality unfortunately. With everyone trying to measure their work and justify their body counts through ticket counts, having a ticket opened for every act of work has become the standard. Read full review ScreenShots