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)
CloudBees Continuous Integration
Score 7.8 out of 10
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CloudBees Continuous Integration (formerly the CloudBees Jenkins Platform) is a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) solution that extends Jenkins. Developed for on-premise installations, CloudBees CI offers stable releases with monthly updates, as well as additional proprietary tools and enterprise features to enhance the manageability and security of Jenkins. CloudBees CI helps administrators manage growing installations due to ever-increasing teams, projects and jobs…
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Receptive.io (discontinued)
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Pendo Feedback (or Receptive / Receptive.io, acquired by Pendo in 2019) was a SaaS product demand intelligence platform used to collect product feedback and feature requests from customers as well as internal teams. Some years after the acquisition, the product was discontinued.
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Pricing
Azure DevOps
CloudBees Continuous Integration
Receptive.io (discontinued)
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)
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.
For all continuous integration features like multi branch pipeline, continuous build, and deployment execution, highly customizable groovy scripting, well integration with most of repositories like SVN, GIT, etc. are some of the exceptional features which helps devOps related tasks a treat to work everyday. With some minor changes in agent configuration and handling of their configuration on master instances would reduce a lot of issues. Also, cache of maven handling on agents needs to be improved (though not related to tool but the CI pipelines). But, since this is a very mature and performant tool, we expect some out of the box functionalities to handle all such scenarios. Overall, the tool works wonders because of its highly customizable features.
Receptive is very effective for multiple internal teams/department of a single product who need to scale their product feedback management effectively. We've been leveraging it for one of our products and it was so successful, that we implemented it with a second product. The main issue we ran into situationally with that was managing 2+ modules (products) in Receptive; it was a bit more difficult to present Receptive to two different customer bases/users (we couldn't change the appearance) and slightly confusing to do within the app (lots of filtering needed). I have heard that support of multiple modules is something that Receptive will likely be working on in the near future, so that's good news.
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.
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.).
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 seems very unreachable from my experience. They handle cases if developers are facing issues, support seems to be very limited. It's not like other tools in a market where every mail is being taken priority and responses are sent. We see a lack in this particular aspect when it comes to CloudBees Jenkins Platform.
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.
CloudBees Jenkins Support is on par with the other enterprise tools we're currently using. It has performed well enough that we've adopted the product and placed it in the critical path of our software delivery pipelines.
We had UserVoice prior to Receptive but it was just too clunky and extensive for our needs. It was less about automation and still very manual work to process feedback. It also didn't provide collaboration levels that we needed for our internal teams to work together. ProdPad was a very clean tool but also didn't enable us to automate the process like Receptive does.
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.
We were managing these enhancements in our support ticketing system, using spreadsheets, and it was TERRIBLE. Being able to tell a user "Great idea! Submit it to Feedback!" has saved my support team hundreds of hours.
We have reduced incoming support requests when the request is really an enhancement - the ability to have a "Suggest Features" widget in our software sends users straight to Feedback.
Because we can make some fields required, we can cut down on the need to reach back out to our users for clarification.
