Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System) is an agile development product that is an extension of the Microsoft Visual Studio architecture. Azure DevOps includes software development, collaboration, and reporting capabilities.
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
BMC AMI DevX
Score 4.0 out of 10
N/A
An enterprise ready, low-code Git-based DevOps toolchain that enables all developers to connect, transform and modernize mainframe application with CI/CD automation, integrated developer environments (IDE), AI/ML-based application performance monitoring and visualization dashboards, and automated testing.
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Pricing
Azure DevOps Services
BMC AMI DevX
Editions & Modules
Azure Artifacts
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Basic Plan
$6
per user per month (first 5 users free)
Azure Pipelines - Self-Hosted
$15
per extra parallel job (1 free parallel job with unlimited minutes)
Azure Pipelines - Microsoft Hosted
$40
per parallel job (1,800 minutes free with 1 free parallel job)
ADO is well suited for the visibility of day-to-day tasks and responsibilities as well as things such as Features, user stories, etc. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any scenario where it might not be well suited, as you can customize ADO to your liking to a degree.
It's pretty good at creating an extract of a whole table, but not the best at grabbing all related tables in my experience. Pretty intuitive on setting up your test data categories. I also really like that it can either run via ISPF or via Topaz which was included with our purchase.
Flexible Requirements Hierarchy Management: AZDO makes it easy to track items such as features or epics as a flat list, or as a hierarchy in which you can track the parent-child relationship.
Fast Data Entry: AZDO was designed to facilitate quick data entry to capture work items quickly, while still enabling detailed capture of acceptance criteria and item properties.
Excel Integration: AZDO stands out for its integration with MS Excel, which enables quick updates for bulk items.
I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.
Azure DevOps is a powerful, complex cloud application. As such there are a number of things it does great and something where there is room for improvement. One of those areas would be in usability. In my opinion it relies too much on search. There is no easy way to view all projects or to group them in a logical way. You need to search for everything.
When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.
Support has been amazing compared to Optim. Further, new features are very regular with File-AID - I can't remember the last time Optim had a significant update. File-AID support is very receptive to feature requests and reported bugs, including sending out hotfixes quickly.
Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.
Optim is more user friendly in how it operates, in my opinion. It's less obtuse to figure out how to extract and mask the data required compared to File-AID. Further, Optim is easier to gather related tables, by far. I do prefer using File-AID via the Topaz GUI much more than using Optim via its GUI. Finally, I personally believe that File-AID is significantly faster to run than Optim - this could be a configuration issue.
