Azure DevOps vs. Modern Requirements4DevOps

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.

Incentivized

We tried the Modern Requirements4DevOps AddIn to see if it brings a added value to our development. I have to say that I would distinguish between types of projects in which it is beneficial and in which it is probably "over engineering". Certainly, bigger development projects with higher complexity are more suitable than small and not really complex projects. However, for the bigger projects Modern Requirements4DevOps definitely helps to deal with the complexity as it adds way more contextualisation to the various entities. It really helps to understand which requirements led to which action in a diagram or task during development. It helps to control the complexity and inform all team members along the project.

Incentivized

• Utilize Git as a repository to share work between multiple users
• Ability to configure Pipelines to build containers to run virtual deployments and testing scripts.
• Split individual tasks and relate to master documents for quick navigation and ability to see overall picture of project.
• Track status of each task
• Integrate with Git to utilize branches, merging, approvals, history, etc.

Incentivized

• Smart Documents
• Building a connection between individual entities (requirements, documents, tasks, tests)
• Requirements Management and Reporting

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.

• forms could be transferred into in line fields to allow in line maintenance of data
• make window management of diagram builder more flexibility to make more space to build diagrams
• I would wish that the performance is a bit better sometimes, loading times can be quite long in some cases

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

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.

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

Modern Requirements4DevOps is an AddIn for Azure DevOps Server (Microsoft Azure DevOps) and extends the native features of Azure DevOps in the area of Requirements Engineering, Requirements Management and Reporting. Azure DevOps already contains tons of valuable features. However, for bigger and more complex projects Modern Requirements4DevOps extends Azure DevOps by further features. Thus we used both products alongside.

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

• Better communication --> thus less misunderstandings
• More Transparency about requirements --> adds context and helps to build a common understanding
• Traceability of Requirements --> we used the baseline also to look into the history of requirements to understand how certain requirements have changed

Incentivized