Azure DevOps vs. Jira Service Management

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

I think using a ticketing system is very easy to use and allows multiple teams to create help desks in the same portal. In terms of internal usage, I think this is a great option. However, suppose you're trying to keep internal items and external helpdesks in the same instance. In that case, this is not ideal, as there is no effective way to separate the two instances to protect internal data better.

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

• Integration with many of the most common tools companies are using (Slack, MS Teams, Salesforce, ... etc)
• Natural workflow with Jira (as product development / project management tool) which makes the full fix and follow up of the tickets / issues very easy to follow
• Allow multiple different entry points and work flows for as many different needs your teams / company have

• 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.

• Navigating through issues outside of a kan ban board can be confusing and task heavy.
• It's easy to clutter up the tool. It could use some easy clean up capabilities.
• User interface is decent, but could use work to make it more intuitive.

Incentivized

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

In the current contect the requirments is around having a tool that is focused and can handle large ticket volumes and tracking incident, problem and user requests concerning end users. Jira has built in functionality to address the above practice needs faily easily and has a substantial amount of customizable reports for generating the relevant intelligence.

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

If you're used to other tools in the Atlassian ecosystem, you'll feel right at home with JSM. It's also a platform that technical folk can easily pick up. However, I wouldn't recommend using JSM as a company's first jumping off point into Atlassian. There are a lot of other 'newer' tools that provide sleeker ITSM systems at a similar cost.

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

I gave JIRA a 9 rating since for me JIRA works according to its purpose. Since there is a customer portal, our clients can leave a comment or communicate with us using the PR ticket that way it is easier for us to also request any additional information we need for our investigation.

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

Zendesk is a similar ticketing system that our organization used before JIRA Service Desk. The main drawback of Zendesk was that it can only be used as a cloud service. This means that our company data would be living on the internet at the hands of their security team. Another drawback of this is the price is significantly more expensive rather than hosting it yourself. Zendesk does have some additional features such as commenting on multiple tickets at once that JSD does lack. However, switching to JSD was significantly more cost effective because we have the ability and the infrastructure to host our own ticketing system, something that Zendesk could not provide. Ultimatley switching to JSD saved us money and allows the ability for integration with all of the other Atlassian Suite products that we use on a day to day basis.

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

• It is definitely cheaper than Salesforce
• It allows the IT service desk to be more organized and respond more quickly to tickets, which can save time for both agent and requester.
• Some things are "not quite there" developmentally, so this means that internal IT will need to spend more time developing and testing the product.

Incentivized