AzureDevOps Server (formerly Team Foundation Server, or TFS) is a test management and application lifecycle management tool, from Microsoft's Visual Studio offerings. To license Azure DevOps Server an Azure DevOps license and a Windows operating system license (e.g. Windows Server) for each machine running Azure DevOps Server.
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Rocket DevOps
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Rocket DevOps (formerly Rocket Aldon) enables true end-to-end (CI/CD) for IBM i+ environments. Businesses can extend holistic DevSecOps best practices to the IBM i, pursue innovative experimentation, easily respond to compliance audits, and adapt to the ever-changing expectations of process, technology, or experience.
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.
Rocket Aldon is perfect for simple changes to traditional IBM i development using RPGLE, CL, and DDS. It is great for finding related objects that are referenced in many locations and helping recompile all of these objects. However, Aldon has a particularly hard time with SQL views. For some reason, it is determined to lock every table related to a view even though this is not required by the operating system. Whenever one view references another view, you are always in danger of losing a view permanently if you didn't check it out and promote it. To clarify, imagine you created a view CUSTOMER_INFO. Then you make another view called CUSTOMER_SHIPMENTS that joins the CUSTOMER_INFO to a shipping table. If you ever change CUSTOMER_INFO and then promote it, there is a good chance that Aldon will delete the CUSTOMER_SHIPMENTS view and you will not get a single warning. It doesn't happen every time but when it does you are going to have a real mess on your hands.
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.
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.
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
Support is hit and miss. Sometimes they give some great assistance and sometimes they are no help at all. It always seems like they can't replicate the problem but then they never try to get on our system to do deeper research. It's kind of frustrating dealing with them. Also, the website isn't that helpful.
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!
Aldon provides needed functions for our current implementations and legacy systems. As we move toward modernization, we are going to look at alternatives from reviewing cost, integration capabilities and functionality
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.
