Item: Azure DevOps Server
Rating: 6
Author: Mark Orlando

Overall Satisfaction with Azure DevOps Server (formerly Team Foundation Server)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Azure DevOps to manage and store all our corporate source code and deploy our applications to a string of various environments from development to production. In addition, we use Azure DevOps on a daily basis to manage our agile-based projects. Azure DevOps is used to track and follow the progress of customer support tickets as well. Our business analysts use the Agile Project Management feature to log user stories.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Azure DevOps easily handles our source code and works seamlessly with Visual Studio (our main development environment).
Our business analysts use its features to document and assign user stories for Agile-based projects.
Our deployment team uses Azure DevOps to push code from development to main to user acceptance and finally production.

Cons

For managing Agile projects, web-based navigation is terrible. There's no easy drop-down menu system you have to hunt and peck around to try and find pages to manage your hours.
Our management needs the ability to predict when development may finish a project. Azure DevOps fails here because it doesn't easily provide a feature to let you predict an end date and it doesn't easily provide you with a feature to export the data to Excel so you could plug-in a formula to calculate an end date.
The menu options for code management are sparse. It would be great if they had a feature to let you simply drag and drop folder structures.

Return on Investment

It used to be a half-day downtime for our entire team when an application needed to be deployed to a new environment. Now it takes 10 minutes.
While its agile project management is mediocre, Azure DevOps makes the tracking and management of customer support tickets a breeze.
Azure DevOps is so much more intuitive than Git. It's effortless to move your code from one project to another and track changes made from in-shore and off-shore teams.

Alternatives Considered

At the time we brought Azure DevOps in-house it really was the only game in town. Our company migrated from Visual SourceSafe to TFS to Azure DevOps without any issues or downtime. Git isn't overly intuitive so I never recommend it and shy away from it. I loved it when Microsoft gave MSDN subscribers a free local version for in-home use but that seems to have gone by the wayside. Still, your choice is Azure DevOps or Git.

Support Rating

Microsoft supports its products well. Considering the complexity of managing all the software built by a corporation, DevOps is perfect. It never messes up code merges - an incredible feat by itself. There is certainly room for improvement in the product, but considering it brings agile project management features, software deployment and source code management in one package it really can't be beaten.

Key Insights

Do you think Azure DevOps Server delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Azure DevOps Server's feature set?

Did Azure DevOps Server live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Azure DevOps Server go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Azure DevOps Server again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Microsoft Visual Studio

Likelihood to Recommend

Azure DevOps works great if you spend most of your day in Visual Studio. If you plan on using VS Code, then skip it because Azure DevOps doesn't really work with VS Code. VS Code works with Git. For project management, Azure Dev Ops is okay, but project managers need to provide their team with links to where things are. Additionally, you might be better off using OneNote to document requirements and simply add links to your user stories where developers and testers can read the stories. The Word-like editor in Azure DevOps is extremely primitive.

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Software Management and Agile Project Management in One Package