Azure DevOps

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.

• 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.

Atlassian Jira, monday.com and ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management

Microsoft Teams, ServiceNow Customer Service Management, monday.com

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.

• Generating work item numbers and assigning accountability.
• Storage of test cases.
• Easy to see linking between tasks, user stories, acceptance criteria etc.

• 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.

Atlassian Confluence

Atlassian Confluence, Miro, Azure DevOps Services

We use Azure DevOps to track work from our Dev Team and manage projects in one shared place.<div>

</div><div>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.</div><div>

</div><div>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.</div>

• 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.

Motivosity, monday.com, Gemini

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.

• 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.

Visual Studio App Center (discontinued)

GitHub, GitHub Copilot, JetBrains Rider

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.

• 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

GitHub and GitLab

ReSharper, JetBrains Rider, CLion