Bringing it all together: People, Products, Process—Azure DevOps
October 12, 2019
Bringing it all together: People, Products, Process—Azure DevOps
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS)
Azure DevOps is primarily used by our development and technologies business. It is our premiere tool for application lifecycle management. Azure DevOps helps support real-time communication among global teams ensuring efficiency in all stages of the lifecycle. The build and release pipelines help us to manage thousands of customized application releases assuring customers get our critical changes quickly and regularly.
- The backlogs and Kanban boards for planning and tracking work are second to none. Forecasting and capacity management are made easy with the Azure DevOps tools at our disposal.
- The ability to customize work items and workflow is crucial to our business. We are in a specialized, highly regulated business with requirements, unlike most software businesses. We continue to strive to keep development and delivery as lean and agile as possible. We are slowly adopting more DevOps principles. This is especially challenging for our business due to government regulations. As a result, we've adopted an Agile/Waterfall hybrid methodology. Customizing the process, work items and workflow gives us the ability to meet our unique needs.
- Git integration is a key feature and keeps our developers happy.
- Some of the administrative tasks and management leaves much to be desired. Security and permissions are managed in different places instead of one central location. Alerts and notifications management could use improvement.
- Due to the nature of our business, we are not able to move to the cloud and must use the on-prem version. While Microsoft officially supports the on-prem version, they are geared towards the cloud version of Azure DevOps. Microsoft support for many of our on-prem needs seem to be waning.
- Work items should be able to be baselined along with code. While we can label the code that was built, there is no way to take a snapshot in time of the historical state of the work items at the time of the build. A feature like this would save our QA department lots of work.
- Our many customer and government audits are streamlined due to the many roles and lifecycle phases integrated into one place with full history and traceability. Smooth audits translate to customer retention and repeat business.
- Our release cadence of thousands of customized applications occurs rapidly due to Build and Release Pipelines. This equates to customer retention, repeat business and an increased rate of new customer acquisition.
- All roles, development, test, project and design management, business analysts, DevOps, QA, and others all work more efficiently, in concert with each other and meet frequent release schedules consistently.
- IBM Rational ClearCase, Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued) and IBM ClearQuest
Azure DevOps offers full lifecycle management from ideas to development to test and release. Everything is in one place and has traceability from inception to release, maintenance and retirement. The other systems only offer small parts of what Azure DevOps has. They offer loose integrations, but your organization will be missing that full lifecycle traceability with these tools.
Do you think Azure DevOps Services delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Azure DevOps Services's feature set?
Yes
Did Azure DevOps Services live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Azure DevOps Services go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Azure DevOps Services again?
Yes