Azure DevOps vs. Visual Studio Test Professional

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

It would be well suited if we used it with Azure DevOps as we can effortlessly integrate the test cases and even stories or tasks to stay on track with our work. Those test cases can even be reused across multiple projects. Using any other third-party tools, such as Jira, can be less appropriate, as it's not a Microsoft tool, and its capabilities will be limited.

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

• Availability of the desktop client or the web interface. The web interface being the favorite and providing a better experience.
• It enables you to write unit tests with so much ease.
• Allows the recording and repeating of manual tests
• It can be set up for collaboration.

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.

• The user community of the Visual Studio Test product is weak. For instant problems with this product, it is necessary to quickly reach the source of the error.
• Licence fees need to be more reasonable. License prices need to be reduced so that they can easily compete with free testing tools.

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.).

Incentivized

It is very usable if you are familiar with Visual Studio to begin with. If you are new to the interface, it can be a long ramp up period for Testers not used to the GUI. There is always the web option which seems to be more intuitive for many Testers.

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

Visual Studio Test Professional is backed up by the full support of the Microsoft Corporation. That means twenty-four/seven customer support by quality, highly-trained professionals who understand every possible issue that you have experienced before. They are nice, efficient, and highly professional. I recommend them.

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

The visual Studio Test tool is faster than other tools. Since the development and testing processes are in one tool, it is more profitable in terms of cost. It is more inconvenient to write a test case in DevOps.

• 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

• One of the positive ROIs of Visual Studios is the fact that it makes producing our work at a quick rate, things like Intellisense make our work get produced at a much higher rate which is good for our return of investment.
• Testing by the developers has increased by 23%, we now take the time to actually test our product before we send it to our QA people.
• I am not aware of any negative ROI aspects to our company that have been found.

Incentivized