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)
Digital.ai Agility
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Digital.ai Agility (formerly VersionOne) helps organizations harness the power of their people’s knowledge, processes, and technology to build agile practices that scale across the enterprise. Its capabilities enable organizations to align products and investments with strategic business goals by coordinating planning, tracking, and reporting work across large distributed companies. Digital.ai Agility connects business strategy with team execution, providing a unified view at all levels,…
N/A
Pricing
Azure DevOps
Digital.ai Agility
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)
Digital.ai Agility provided a better user experience with more functionality geared towards the type of processes our team was following. Trello was too basic and did not have nearly the functionality we needed. Azure DevOps had many of the same features as Digital.ai …
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.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
Scenarios where it works well: 1) Retros can be very well facilitated & notes/action items can be captured against the sprint. 2) Product Owner can effectively track the story progress with all the test-cases, design etc. 3) Being good scaling support, it provides good visibility across multiple teams, programs and agile portfolios, providing a centralized environment where all our stakeholders can easily work together regardless of location. 4) It provides easy tracking all of your epics, stories, themes, defects, tasks, tests and issues 5) I like its intuitive UI as for moving stories around, burning hours. 6) It allows top leadership to visualize and report their strategic plans, giving all stakeholders the relevant data that they need to stay dedicated to the project priorities. 7) It can be easily integrated with slack so for few teams we used slack for collaboration Scenarios where it did not work well: 1) Test Management need improvement in terms of tracking tests, team had hard time tracking regression test cases. 2) Version one comes with lot of features like Rally but here we don’t get customizations which is there in Jira where from workflow to issue everything can be customized based on your team/program/portfolio requirements. 3) Lot of navigation to access basic stuff. Example I want to go to bug attachment , there are lt of clicks & navigation need to do which should be pretty straightforward I feel.
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.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
Although Digital.ai Agility supports customizations, they can be somewhat cumbersome to set up and maintain
The Analytics engine's user experience for digging into the data does not have the same feel as the rest of the system and, as a result, can be hard to work with
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.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
No answers on this topic
Usability
Microsoft
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.).
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Microsoft
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.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
VersionOne provides outstanding training. They have Product Owner training that I recommend every Product Owner attend. They have scrum master training and other agile training that was well worth the money paid because it made the teams more productive. And the support for the tool is incredible. These people live and breathe Agile and are evangelists and enthusiasts.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
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.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
JIRA appears to be more extensible with the ability for Scrum, Kanban, bug/incident tracking, and the ability to customize dashboards. However, VersionOne's performance over the same teams is extremely fast in comparison and therefore allows users to be more productive over the same amount of time.
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.