Azure DevOps vs. FogBugz

Azure DevOps works well when you’ve got larger delivery efforts with multiple teams and a lot of moving parts, and you need one place to plan work, track it properly, and see how everything links together. It’s especially useful when delivery and development are closely tied and you want backlog items, code and releases connected rather than spread across tools. Where it’s less of a fit is for small teams or simple pieces of work, as it can feel like more setup and process than you really need, and non-technical users often struggle with the interface. It also isn’t great if you want instant, easy programme-level views or a very visual planning experience without putting time into configuration.

Incentivized

FogBugz has been a very useful tool to our organization, and much preferred over other options we reviewed, mainly JIRA. There are still some improvements needed, but with the fairly recent acquisition by DevFactory, we have a great deal of hope for what is in store given DevFactory's focus and transparency. It seems like both DevFactory and FogBugz customers are eager for substantial improvements on the front-end, but there is/was a great deal of backend housecleaning that definitely needed to take place first.

Incentivized

• Utilize Git as a repository to share work between multiple users
• Ability to configure Pipelines to build containers to run virtual deployments and testing scripts.
• Split individual tasks and relate to master documents for quick navigation and ability to see overall picture of project.
• Track status of each task
• Integrate with Git to utilize branches, merging, approvals, history, etc.

Incentivized

• Tasks, Subtasks, and notes. All three of these areas were critical for our team. Tasks in Fogbugz were a bit easier to see than in more bug based software like Trello or JIRA
• The entire screen is used to view a task or case. Clicking on a task or case will open up and take up the entire screen, aside from the sidebar nav columns. I like to see details and I think Fogbugz does this very well, using up as much digital real estate as possible.
• Flowcharting in Fogbugz with Creately is nice - instead of getting an exterior flowchart software like Lucidchart, Creately works right in Fogbugz.

Incentivized

• I did mention it has good visibility in terms of linking, but sometimes items do get lost, so if there was a better way to manage that, that would be great.
• The wiki is not the prettiest thing to look at, so it could have refinements there.
• It could improve the search slightly better.

• The simplicity of a single admin type user is not great because anyone who can create a job or client in the system, can also add and delete users. Content and User administrative rights should be separated.
• There are ways to change the terminology/lexicon within the tool, but we are not able to get it to work even after reaching out to tech support. So we are forced to use the system terminology that doesn't match up to our company making training a bit difficult.
• There is a subscribe function that you can opt into, there should be a way to add subscribers as you create a new task.

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.

Incentivized

It's a great help to get more information about new feature release and stay updated on what the dev team is working on. I like how easy it is to just login and read through the work items. Each work item has basic details: Title, Description, Assigned to, State, Area (what it belongs to), and iteration (when it’s worked on). See image above.They move through different states (New → Discovery → Ready for Prod → etc.).

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Was not part of the process.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I like JIRA a lot better than Fogbugz for many reasons. If I had a choice, I'd use JIRA every time

Incentivized

• We have saved a ton of time not calculating metrics by hand.
• We no longer spend time writing out cards during planning, it goes straight to the board.
• We no longer track separate documents to track overall department goals. We were able to create customized icons at the department level that lets us track each team's progress against our dept goals.

Incentivized

• Saves time by quickly allowing Developers to make the necessary notes without getting bogged down in bloated UIs
• Has allowed us to look back easily and see the exact code changes made for the exact Case to aid in decisions for current changes, increasing the certainty of the decided path, without regression

Incentivized