Azure DevOps vs. CloudBees Codeship

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.

Incentivized

Codeship is extremely well suited for projects that are version controlled on public hosting such as Github or Bitbucket, and for situations where you need to pick up code from these systems and deploy it to different cloud environments. For example, we had two projects for the same client that were hosted on Github and needed to be deployed to AWS and Heroku. The native CI/CD tools of these cloud environments could not provide a holistic solution to deploy to both environments the way Codeship did.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Codeship provides a set of tools for quickly creating and building our deployment artifacts and push them to the designated servers.
• Codeship's hooks allows our developers to simply push tags from our git repositories to initiate a deployment of code to a server. No one outside of the devops team needs any expertise to get our code packages delivered.
• Codeship allows us to tie in behat and unit tests easily to prevent delivery of buggy code.

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.

• I would like to see a little bit more than the green/red status. If there are tests, it would be good to see how many have failed on a red build.
• To improve build times (and reduce feedback times), it would be good to see how long build, tests, and deployment take over time. An overview like that could very easily point to potential areas of improvement. I think Codeship users do not want to bother with the build process, but, if there is anything to improve and increase productivity it's very unlikely that users wouldn't want to do this.

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

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.

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

Our company uses Jenkins for all internal deployment processes for one very important reason - it's hosted internally. But Codeship is great for personal use - it has intuitive UI, easy setup and tons of integrations.

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

• Having the code tested thoroughly. While it's obviously a part of the job that still requires the developer to sit down and to actually have some decent and thorough tests implemented, by using codeship we were able to guarantee 100% that our code was being tested each and every time it got commited and pushed onto our repositories. Leading to a faster, shorter and sure implementation iterative cycle.
• Fewer 'man in the middle' processes which required more steps and people involved just to get the code shipped onto our deployment servers.
• Almost inexistent learning curve. Codeship is simple to use and very intuitive. Nobody in our development department had a hard time figuring out how to have it properly configured for each new project created there.

Incentivized