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)
ProGet
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
inedo offers ProGet, a software repository and package management solution.
N/A
Pricing
Azure DevOps Services
ProGet
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)
DevOps is much more user friendly than Git itself. There is a more GUI-centric interface, tighter integration with the Azure / Entra architecture. For those of use in the Microsoft-sphere, it really is excellent for code-centric project management. I rate this as an 8 because it does not seem quite as well suited for fully functional / non-code project aspects in implementation. Nor does it have customer / end-user portal / front end for easy reporting and insight.
As of current, the only artifactory management tool that I would recommend is ProGet. The free version is plentiful in features, supporting all feed types that the paid plans do. The paid plans also add even more capabilities on top of the free plan, such as data retention policies, which helps to minimize storage waste on my server and keep everything clean.
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.
The Docker registry feature works great. Compared to Sonatype Nexus 3, I don't need to set up extra ports, as everything just works off the port ProGet itself is running on.
Debian feeds support automatic GPG key generation, without me having to create or manage them myself. This is another spot where ProGet is better than Nexus, as you have to manually create and specify a key with Nexus, while ProGet simply handles it all for you.
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.
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.
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.
Both Sonatype Nexus 3 and ProGet support all the feed types I use, but ProGet simply does them better. The Docker feeds run on the same port as ProGet itself, while Nexus requires additional ports to be set up, which can be a burden when running in Docker. Debian feeds also support GPG key creation without having to manually specify one, again, reducing the burden for me to manually do things, allowing me to set up and distribute my programs even quicker.
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.
