Azure DevOps Services

Formerly VSTS

Azure DevOps, on the whole, is very easy to set up and use if you have any experience with Agile processes. The initial barriers to entry are extremely low as the first 5 users can leverage the tool for free. I found the overall feature/functionality easier to use and more approachable than similar tools. It is also leaps and bounds better than TFS if you haven't looked at it in a while. If you are already a git user, this is directly integrated with git repos, making the transition easy. The tool is also integrated with many other Microsoft products, so if you are a Microsoft-centric shop, you can leverage the broader ecosystem.

If you are looking at Azure DevOps, you know why you need this. It is an inexpensive development process software. You need a place to host your remote git repo. You want to be able to track work and reference it later. You want to build out a full CI/CD pipeline based on commits. This is not a simple ticket tracking system. If that is all you want, go elsewhere!

No matter how many developers you have within the company, a robust source code control/DevOps pipeline is a must. When a new software development project is needed it can be initiated within DevOps by any team member/manager. The project can be tracked from start to finish with alerts and message ability directly in the product. The QA team can also monitor and provide feedback directly within the product.

Before using Azure DevOps, the department was calculating metrics by hand. It was a very tedious process that, at times required duplicate effort. Once we added the online boards, we were able to let the cards automatically calculate dates and provide us with team metrics instantly. It is also great for being able to easily move features from one team to another. Before we added all teams in the same project, it would require us to re-enter the features. We move features around a lot so that has been a big help. I also like the board customization, not all of our teams follow the exact same Agile flow, so allowing each board to have its own columns, states, and notifications give flexibility to each team.

Although hosting Azure DevOps in-house with their on-prem version is manageable, it seems that Azure DevOps is better suited for development shops that are able to utilize the cloud version. That said, if your medium to large-sized company is like ours and need your ALM tools on-prem, be prepared to invest in multiple, full-time staff dedicated to administration if choosing Azure DevOps. For small companies, both cloud and on-prem versions are acceptable.

Azure DevOps is well suited for any platform you are running. In my case, it was a great Chef cookbook pipeline solution that required no overhead or setup, cost nothing, and worked great. It works well with on-prem systems, systems in Azure, systems in AWS, and even systems in Google Cloud. Honestly, it's a really great multi-platform tool in my opinion.

Azure DevOps is by far the leader out there. If you are a Microsoft shop there is no need to look elsewhere. This will handle everything you have with ease and then some. If you have older code then you may need to build some customizations to make it work but anything recent is seamless.

Azure DevOps allows you to start with DevOps methodology in a fast and easy way. The graphical interface is great and it is suitable to small and big teams. It really helps you to manage projects, tasks and teams.

Azure DevOps is great for daily releases to QA and allowing developers to deploy to their own local environments if needed. Additionally, it's great for use in container fleet management if you want to have instances that can be brought up and torn upon demand based on the pipeline you are trying to use.

It's a great way to normalize DevOps wokflows, allowing you to replace lots of different tools and get the job done with a unified package. Testing support is second to none. If you're just focusing on development with version control, than Visual Studio packed with Git will probably cover all your needs.

For development teams with a history of Microsoft tools alignment, Azure DevOps provides familiar patterns and interfaces. And for product management / product marketing users, the use of use of data entry and the Excel integration provide for easy on-ramps for learning and proficiency development. For teams that have used tools such as FogBugz, the boards and case layouts may take a little getting used to.

Team System is the best solution if you use Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise as your main development platform, especially if you have a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement. Even though it can be used with any development project management framework it is better in an informal environment using Scrum.

Wonderful for process mapping.

For us, as a Microsoft shop, it fits very well into what we're doing. This is especially true since we had used TFS for years. In fact, we wish we had made the transition sooner. Like all tools, there is a learning curve for everyone involved in the transition. It's taken our team time to learn the ins and out. And it's been a great leap forward for us. Microsoft VSTS may not be as friendly depending on the technologies you use. We've found it works well, even with non-Microsoft technologies. We're excited to see further tie-ins with GitHub and other technologies in the future.

Great for development teams that don't work closely with a product management team.
Not suited for an organization where product management develops and prioritizes development work.

It has been a great tool when comes to code compilation. As a developer, it helps a lot for us to find issues in the code, as Microsoft Visual Studio Team System has the best debugging tools. We can also check the code line by line to find the exact line where the error is. Developers can also place their important code at their shelveset and can easily get it from there when they need to. As for integration, it helps us to compile large code and deploy the changes with a single GO.

For large project or a large team, the product is well suited when this technology is already implemented, because nowadays for version control there are products like GitHub. For a company who is concerned about security, this is a way to make their projects accessible from their TFS, and no one can use it for personal use. This is also useful for maintaining a site that a group of developers are working on, where their work items need to change, like peer test, peer review etc.

VSTS is a software that can be used by advanced programmers, and it is also an excellent option in a team of developers that begin to train and become familiar with an IDE. It can be used in large development teams or in particular developments is perfectly adapted to the needs of the developer.

If you are building a build system for a Microsoft product that doesn't have a lot of steps, VSTS is something that should be looked at. If you want to deploy your application to Azure it is even better. Running Visual Studio to build, run tests and perform load and performance tests works very well. Just be prepared to have your initial setup take some time.

Anyone who is currently using TFS should migrate to VSTS immediately. Having maintained TFS servers in the past, this is substantially easier. Additionally, the web interface has gotten easier to use and features to move work items between projects has improved greatly. We're also in the process of migrating away from our Atlassian toolset - so it gives you an idea of how versatile the product really is.

I love using VSTS for sprint planning and daily task execution. It provides a central hub for viewing all new features and bug fix work that a team has committed to in a given iteration.

VSTS is well suited for just about any coding project that can be built and deployed on a Windows platform. Building platform-specific languages is not as easy to build on their cloud server, but private agents can also be set up on target systems to allow for building in just about any environment.

VSTS is best used in an environment or company where everyone is sold on the idea of agile. In a highly competitive landscape, agile is important and VSTS is a tool that aids this ideology. If your organization is still using waterfall and doesn't plan on changing, I would look elsewhere.

Well suited for .net shops, distributed/offshore outsourcing, or small scale development. Less suitable for isolated or modular component development. Although the API is suitable, the licensing cost may be prohibitive for open source projects. VSTS is an end to end change management and collaboration tool that has a robust feature set for the enterprise. A VS Code-like analog companion similar to VSTS for no charge would be excellent.

In larger distributed teams or even smaller local teams, MVST is a big contender in application/architecture delivery. In areas where there might be a finite amount of resources or the development can be done more out of a "shrink wrapped" solution, without the need for large configuration of an IDE, it may be suited to stay simpler and do something else besides MVST.