#1 most frequent
United States of America
45.4%15,266 installations of 33,661
What is Azure DevOps?
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.
Categories & Use Cases
Videos
Who Buys & Uses Azure DevOps
#2 most frequent
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
6.9%2,330 installations of 33,661
#3 most frequent
Canada
6.1%2,070 installations of 33,661
Pros
- Mature CI/CD environment and efficient pipeline execution
- Robust work item management for structuring complex projects
- Seamless integration with Git for version control
Cons
- Steep learning curve and complexity for new users
- Difficulties with pipeline and workflow configuration, including YAML syntax
- Challenging integration with external customer-facing and time-keeping systems
Azure DevOps FTW
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Azure DevOps as the main place we run delivery across a mix of internal transformation work and programmes. It’s basically our main system for planning work, tracking progress, and keeping teams aligned. Not just developers either, the PMs, BAs and leads are all in there. The biggest problems it helps with are visibility and coordination. We’ve got multiple workstreams running at the same time, often across different teams and sometimes suppliers, and without a single tool things quickly turn into spreadsheets and status chasing. Azure DevOps gives us one place to see what’s actually happening, what’s blocked, and what’s coming next, even if it’s not perfect. Our use case is more delivery and programme focused than “pure” software engineering. We use Boards a lot for epics, features and stories, sprint planning, and basic reporting. Repos are used where we’re doing active development, but it’s not the main thing for us. It’s not always the most intuitive tool and we don’t use every feature, but it does a solid job of keeping work structured and giving leadership a view without loads of manual updates.
Pros
- It’s very good at breaking big, messy programmes down into epics, features and stories so you can actually see what needs doing and in what order.
- Sprint planning and backlog prioritisation work well once teams get into a rhythm, especially when you’re juggling multiple workstreams at the same time.
- The ability to link work items together makes dependencies and blockers much more visible than trying to manage them in spreadsheets.
- It scales well as programmes grow, so you don’t have to completely change tooling once a small project turns into something much bigger.
Cons
- Customising workflows and fields is powerful but not very user-friendly, and small changes can feel more complex or risky than they need to be.
- The learning curve for new users is quite steep, and it usually needs proper onboarding rather than people just picking it up as they go.
- It's not as pretty or intuitive as tools like monday.com - GANTT and waterfall are espsecially hard as the tool isn't designed for this.
Return on Investment
- The ROI has been positive mainly through improved visibility, better prioritisation, and less time wasted on manual tracking and status updates across larger programmes.
- We haven’t seen major direct cost savings, but delivery quality and consistency have definitely improved, which supports wider business objectives.
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Atlassian Jira, monday.com and ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management
Other Software Used
Microsoft Teams, ServiceNow Customer Service Management, monday.com
ADO - an all encompassing tool.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use ADO for a wide range of things. We create work items in there, essentially being a unique number that we can associate with a project. We also use ADO to create features, user stories, acceptance criteria, and test cases in ADO. The linking system in ADO allows good visibility across these.
Pros
- The use of the scrum-like board, which can be customized to your liking.
- Excellent linking and visibility across items in ADO e.g. user stories, features, test cases, tasks, etc.
- Storing Test Cases.
Cons
- 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.
Most Important Features
- Generating work item numbers and assigning accountability.
- Storage of test cases.
- Easy to see linking between tasks, user stories, acceptance criteria etc.
Return on Investment
- Has made it easier to manage resources and projects in general.
- Great visibility of what's going on with the work.
- Easy to learn how to use.
Alternatives Considered
Atlassian Confluence
Other Software Used
Atlassian Confluence, Miro, Azure DevOps Services
Azure DevOps for Tech Team and LD Teams
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Azure DevOps to track work from our Dev Team and manage projects in one shared place.
It helps solve problems like unclear progress, scattered updates across email or Slack, and difficulty tracking timelines. Teams can easily see what’s being worked on, what’s coming next, and when tasks are expected to be completed.
Operations, Marketing, and other teams use it to submit requests, follow delivery plans, and collaborate in one system. This improves visibility, reduces back-and-forth updates, and keeps everyone aligned on priorities and timelines.
Pros
- We have Release Notes from Dev of the current feature update or bug fixes. These notifications have added links to Azure DevOps to provide complete details of the new feature.
- Delivery plan section is useful for strategic planning. It helps stakeholders see the big picture: what’s being delivered, by when, and what value it unlocks.
- I am from the training team and Azure DevOps is used by our tech team mostly so details of the feature I want to train our people is in there. Helps with training content creation.
Cons
- At first its overwhelming especially when you first log in you will only see projects created by our tech team then after you get into that projects there are boards, work items, queries etc so it can be a bit overwhelming.
- For beginners and probably non-tech team it's hard to use.
- Their knowledge base might need improvement as well
Return on Investment
- It helps them keep our tech teams work organized and move faster.
- It puts tasks, code, bugs, and progress updates in one place.
- So the faster a new feature is done the sooner other departments and of course our customers can benefit from it.
- New feature updates and bug fixes helps streamline our customer service operations. Its really an winning situation for the entire company.
Usability
Other Software Used
Motivosity, monday.com, Gemini
Mature product with helpful marketplace
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Azure DevOps for our build and deployment pipelines. This includes building mobile applications for iOS and Android platforms and uploading these to the respective platform stores.
Pros
- Is a mature CI/CD environment
- Has many helpful marketplace applications
- Is easy to maintain and work with
Cons
- Yaml syntax can be hard to work with
- Convertion of visual implementations converted to yaml is not always intuitive
- Release pipelines are not automatically a part of the source repository, which means you have to export this for backup and versioning.
Return on Investment
- The possibility to just start a build for a specific platform has helped us a lot on our mobile project. We used to set up everything on a development machine and build the applications manually which meant that during the build times we couldn't do anything else on that machine. Also if we forgot some setting this would mean that we would have to restart the build and using even more time on the manual builds. It was a great relief to implement our build pipelines, where we didn't have to remember any settings, as the pipeline would be set up for a particular environment that was part of the pipeline instructions. On avaerage this helped us save between 20-40 minutes whenever we needed to release a new build. Also because the release pipeline was set up to automatically upload the mobile app to the platform app store, we could just forget about the build/release and just inform our testers that a new version of the app was on its way.
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Visual Studio App Center (discontinued)
Other Software Used
GitHub, GitHub Copilot, JetBrains Rider
Azure DevOps - good enough but can still be improved
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Azure DevOps has been a central core component in our daily processes. We use it not just to hold the code we write, but also to have some automations during the code review process whether it is through the automated tasks that should run to validate work or if it is just by the automated replies from the bot. Azure DevOps can also be responsible for deploying our tools when the right pipeline is triggered - either manually or via some automated criteria.
Pros
- Pipeline executions
- Agentic code review comments
- Code review process
- Automated tasks
- Build validation
Cons
- The customization of Pull Request default messages
- A manual trigger for the pipelines to only continue a pipeline when we explicitly want - instead of having something waiting for approval.
- Dynamics on the arguments passed to a pipeline when manually running it
Return on Investment
- Time saving with automated validations that run automatically for each pull request update
- Continuous deployment of new releases based on some triggers or conditions
- Automated comments from agents that are capable of identifying flaws in the codes
- Code Coverage reports available through the web UI
Usability
Alternatives Considered
GitHub and GitLab
Other Software Used
ReSharper, JetBrains Rider, CLion