Microsoft Azure DevOps Reviews

We use it for requirements, development work, and testing. 

We're doing an implementation at the moment with the client. So, it is the latest version that would've been uploaded.

It is a cloud-based system. So, it is stable and scalable.

Azure DevOps is set up more for development and less for testing. If it is set up correctly, everyone can use it better, but it was set up from a development point of view, which means it is lacking in what I need from a testing perspective. Just like any other tool, it depends on how it is configured. I am not happy with the way it is set up. It is configured more from a development side, and it doesn't necessarily cater to all the other areas that probably need to use it, such as testing data, etc.

I have been using this solution for about 15 months.

Its stability and performance are okay. It is on the cloud. As long as you have got access to it, it is stable.

It is a cloud-based system. So, you can add more bandwidth. It is scalable on the cloud.

We have about a hundred users who are using this solution. It is used on a daily basis.

A third party deals with the technical support of it at the moment.

I wasn't around when they initially set it up, but the way it is set up, it is too complex. It is probably good for developers, but it is not good for the testing side. 

It is a third party that sets it up. I don't know about its maintenance because I'm not that close to it.

I would advise organizing and doing the right assessment for all teams that are going to use it. When it is being set up, more people within the program need to be involved in the setup, not just the developers. You need to know about the requirements for design, development, testing, integrations, and architecture. You need to solicit requirements on what each one of these teams needs from the tool before the tool is configured. When you set something up only from the development perspective, you forget that there would be a need to extract information for data testing and training. So, you need to assess who all are going to use the tool so that you set it up for maximum usage.

At this time, I'd rather not recommend it because it wasn't set up correctly. It wasn't set up with other teams involved. In a year's time, if I'm working on it again, I may have a different opinion.

I would rate it a five out of 10.

I used Azure DevOps for work item management, sprint planning, source code repository, continuous integration, continuous build, and continuous release. I build whole chains.

The most valuable feature is that it's fully integrated, where we have a single place to do everything that we need.

Testing is really good, it has come a long way.

It is the single source of proof or the single system of record that does everything you need, you don't have to put the different pieces together to form the whole chain.

We can do everything in one single platform, which is why it does a good job.

Requirements management is an area that can be improved.

Integration with Microsoft teams would be a good idea.

I have been using Microsoft Azure DevOps for five years.

It's stable. It's been pretty good, especially in the last two years.

There are no issues with scalability. We have approximately 50 people in our organization who are using it.

We have contacted technical support and they are excellent. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

I am using a mismatch of tools from HP and Atlassian, but they did not give us an integrated toolchain. Microsoft Azure does it exceptionally well.

It is reasonably straightforward, but it is only as straightforward as the problems that you are trying to solve.

If you are trying to set up the whole chain, then the problem is complex, and the solution has to be as equally complex.

The price is reasonable, but of course, you can find others that are cheaper such as Atlassian. But, if you look at the more serious products like Polarion, it's very competitive. 

If you have good Microsoft programs, it's nearly free.

I would certainly recommend this product.

There are a lot of parts to the toolchain for DevOps, so take each area at a time. My advice is to take one step at a time, don't overdo it, and over time build out all of the capacity difficulties. Automation is also one of the biggest things.

Overall, it seems like a really good solution.

I would rate it a ten out of ten.

We have a number of use cases. One of them is development, which includes several development teams that use source code control and testing support, as well as the entire software development toolset. I only use the front end, which is the project task management part.

I don't have any metrics on that. I can only give you anecdotal evidence. 

One of the benefits of using a Kanban board is that it keeps track of how long tasks take. People would hold onto tasks for three or four weeks before we started using the Kanban board. However, once we began using the Kanban board, it became more visible. 

We also realized that we needed to divide the tasks into smaller sections, and the tasks lasted an average of a week. As a result, the throughput and velocity increased simply because the Kanban board made them more visible.

I found the Kanban board to be the most useful for my needs.

I'm a project manager. I've been working with non-technical teams and training them on agile methodologies. Using a Kanban board is usually the most straightforward way to get a non-technical team started with an online task tracking tool.

In comparison to JIRA, I believe DevOps has very poor reporting and metrics support. They've done very little work, and they could benefit greatly from improved reporting and metrics.

Essentially, I would like to see more reporting support.

This solution was already in place when I started. I'm not sure when it was first put in place.

I started with the company in May of 2018, and have been using Microsoft Azure DevOps ever since.

We are using the most recent version.

Microsoft Azure DevOps is a stable solution.

It is difficult to customize DevOps. It's similar to a product that has had features added to it rather than being completely redesigned. As a result, it has limitations in terms of scalability and customization.

The most successful users are software developers and technical software managers.

I believe it is quite minimal. Microsoft, in my opinion, does not provide adequate support. My solutions are mostly found online. 

With JIRA, you could call someone, and they had a large community of users who could answer your questions. They also had a support department that provided assistance. Microsoft has a lot of information online, but you have to find it, look around its various websites. It is not well supported.

I used to work as an engineering manager, a scrum master, and as part of a technical team. JIRA is my preferred tool for this. 

JIRA is a more robust and mature tool. However, as you are aware, JIRA is more modular and requires integration with other parts. DevOps, on the other hand, has everything in one, it combines source code control, release management, and task tracking.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. It's one of its advantages over JIRA. It is easier to set up because it is a simple product, whereas JIRA is more complex, more mature and complete, and more difficult to set up.

We have two or three technicians who deploy and maintain this solution.

You would really have to do a comparison, and you would need some training. 

It really depends on your project management and reporting requirements. DevOps is simple to use, but it is severely limited in terms of project management. JIRA is complete, but it's a lot more complicated.

I only use it for project management and the tools associated with project management. I know it's popular among those who use it for source code control and release management. It appears to be more satisfactory for that purpose.

I would rate Microsoft Azure DevOps a five out of ten.

Our primary use case of Azure is to host our web application. We used Azure SQL databases for our project and found it useful to host our web application and make use of all Azure's facilities, such as function apps, API management services, etc. This solution is cloud deployed. 

Some of the most valuable features are the ease of use and the ability to monitor a lot of things. It has a lot of applications and facilities that meet all the developers' requirements. For example, we can use application insights to get an idea of our application's performance. Since it's cloud-based, it's really good for collaboration and working as a team. 

I can't think of anything I would like to improve, since I don't have complete knowledge of the platform yet. I'm sure that as I gain more experience, I will understand it better. The price could maybe be cheaper, but I'm sure I'll have more ideas as to improvements and additional features once I've used it more. 

I have been using this solution for about two months. 

This solution is stable. From what I have used it for, it has been pretty efficient. 

This solution is scalable. Most of my team uses Azure DevOps and other Azure facilities, so there are quite a lot of users. 

I haven't felt the need to contact support. I'm not sure if any of my friends or colleagues have, but one thing about Microsoft is the documentation is extremely good. So we barely falter anywhere because if we thoroughly follow the documentation, it's pretty easy to follow the process through. 

The installation is straightforward since it's cloud-based. You can do it yourself. For deployment, we were a team of about 20 people. 

We implemented through an in-house team. 

This product could maybe be cheaper. My organization handled licensing, so I'm not aware of which subscription they have. 

I rate this product an eight-and-a-half or nine out of ten. I have partial knowledge about it, since I haven't really explored everything in proper elaborate detail, but I would definitely recommend Microsoft Azure DevOps to others considering implementation. 

I took a part-time job doing a mentorship to guide the students on how to use cloud computing on the AW and Azure cloud resources. For that project, we go through each and every service on cloud computing that is part of the service platform. The new technology is called server-less technology. The goal of the mentorships is showing students how to fundamentally use these resources and explain the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing over on-premises solutions.  

Currently, I do not know if there is really a single feature that stands out as the most valuable. If you consider our use case and that we were using Azure essentially as a teaching tool, it was the tool itself that was valuable.  

I do not have in-depth experience with Microsoft Azure, but it is like other services such as AWS. Currently, the number of services are increasing on Azure actually at a faster rate than with Google Cloud. If you are working with Microsoft products like Office 365 the best cloud solution would be on Azure services. The cost is also better than AWS.  

Microsoft has also built an association with other cloud products for helping to migrate your licenses to the cloud. This works out well if you have a substantial investment in licensing for Microsoft products on-premises. Being able to bring that license to the cloud is a good transitionary solution.  

I have been running reports on the availability of the major competitors in the cloud services to use as a demonstration in webinars and comparison of services. The most available solution on the cloud in user availability by minutes is Google Cloud. Google is the number one solution and the second one is AWS. The third one is Microsoft Azure.  

Compared to the availability of the other two major cloud solutions, Microsoft Azure needs to make an improvement in their availability. This report suggests that the Azure team needs to do some major changes to match the availability of the other services and make the product more competitive.  

In DevOps (software development and IT operations), server-less architecture and QNX platform integrations are things that need to be added to Azure. Currently, I am not sure that this is the case. But previously, I have had experience trying to use Azure with service and integration with the QNX platform and it is not as good as Google Cloud. Azure has improved its current set of data services on the cloud. But Google Cloud is doing more right now to bring those technologies and make them available to developers or enterprise solutions. So, QNX integration needs polishing.  

We have been using the product for only the last two months.

I have not experienced any issues with stability.  

In general, I have seen no real issues with scalability. It is a cloud platform and scalability should usually be available on demand.  

I used Google Cloud on one of my previous projects but currently, we are using the on-premise solution. So we are hosting everything locally on-premises. We do not have any current cloud provider for the business as a whole. We are using AWS for security and backup for the production environment but mostly we rely on the on-premise solutions at the moment.  

We use the S3 compute instance of AWS only. We do not use any other AWS services. We just use VM's that we create on the S3 instance.  

Setup is not so much of an issue as the product is on the cloud. The services are essentially on demand for the product. What you do with the services is what may take more time and consideration.  

I am not comfortable sharing the details of cost because there may be different pricing schemes, but compared to AWS, Azure is less expensive. So in the pricing in this class of services, Azure is good. It can work well for small to medium enterprises. But this solution is may not be good for those who are not enterprise-level users. Small cloud computing providers have better pricing than the bigger cloud computing providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure and may be a better choice for non-enterprise use.  

Still, Azure is priced better than AWS. Price may not be the only thing to consider.  

I have had the opportunity to use a variety of different solutions and it has not really come down to a situation where one is replaced with another. There is an ongoing evaluation of the products as newer technology including the most well known, like AW, Google, and Azure. AWS is the most expensive cloud hosting. In my estimation, that is the best product right now, but things are changing quickly.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Microsoft Azure DevOps as an eight-out-of-ten. It is not quite up to the level of other offerings in some ways but it is improving all the time.  

All the artifacts are tightly integrated into the repository where you have changed tracking, and you can enforce policies. You can improve the quality of your deliverables. You can actually see the progress you're making towards your goal, and you can even forecast how soon a feature can be completed in the future. So, it's that tight integration of bringing all the parties together right from the project managers to the developers, to the system admin who does the deployment that helps achieve the goal of DevOps. That is, the ease of realization of this DevOps ideal is possible.

Most developers and project managers choose the Microsoft tools to begin with because of familiarity, and these new tools are almost an extension of the tools you're already familiar with. There's a lot of knowledge transfer, which helps, rather than bringing in a new product line.

Also, with Azure DevOps there is tight integration to Excel and Office tools so that you can actually even use Excel to do Azure DevOps type tasks. Excel will automatically update the Azure board, your tasks, your company boards, etc. So, there is that condition and familiarity for users.

What I like about it mostly is the tools. You don't need a degree to use them. Also, there's not too heavy a reliance on the CLI.

Right now, they tend to have a limit of 1,000 tasks per sprint, and some of their web-based boards, such as the Kanban boards, no longer display tasks. Once you hit over a certain number of task limits, you need to increase those limits. Depending on how big the sprints you're running are, once you hit that 1,000 limit, you now have to start grouping tasks together. It doesn't allow you to track granularly. When you go to the boards and you are rendering the task board, it gets slower to go over that 1,000 limit. If they could improve that to, maybe, 10,000 and still have good performance, that'd be great.

I've been using it for eight years.

The version we use right now is the 2020 version, but usually, we try and keep within the last two versions.

Depending on the organization, it can be deployed on-premises or as a cloud solution, usually with Microsoft Azure as the cloud provider.

It's very, very stable.

I've used it in organizations with multiple departments using the same installation, and it's scalable. We have about 20 users in multiple departments.

Microsoft support is excellent. Even when you don't have support for some lines, you can call them, and a lot of times, they'll give you what's called a grace case. This means that although you don't have a support contract on a product, they'll help you for free.

Normally, when you call and don't have a support agreement, Microsoft will still charge you an hourly rate to give you an engineer to work with you.

Microsoft Azure DevOps just provides better integration than Jenkins does. I've been in this industry for 27 years. The whole ecosystem and the fact that most of the developers are already using Visual Studio make Microsoft Azure DevOps a good option, along with the entire integration from the project management side, to the development side, to the repository side, and to the deployment side.

Installing Microsoft Azure DevOps is straightforward. You can have everything set up in three or four hours. It's pretty simple.

I've used Jenkins in the past and a group of source repository. I've also used SourceSafe and GitLab.

To run it, to use the tool the way it's designed, you need someone who understands Scrum or Agile project management.

I have used GitLab and other pipeline tools like Jenkins. Azure DevOps combines all of them together, and it beats all of them at everything they do.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate this solution at nine and advise others to go for it.

It is used to manage our projects. We basically maintain what would be the equivalent of our project schedules for various projects. So, we capture or create user stories to identify elements that need to be accomplished for the delivery of a project and to track who is responsible for it and the level of effort. We aggregate that within the tool and report out to leadership about the status of when we anticipate completion.

We are using its latest version.

Its integration with different functions has been very helpful. Previously, we had Microsoft Project schedules, and we did our reporting by using Excel and PowerPoint presentations. We also did testing tracking in other tools, such as HP ALM. Our source code was on Teams Foundation Server. All that can now be done within DevOps, which is a huge benefit. Things that we used to do in different tools can now be done in one tool. 

I like the fact that there is built-in Power BI. Both are Microsoft tools. So, you can incorporate dashboard capabilities. 

I also like the integration with the other toolsets, such as Outlook and GitHub. You can do your testing and check your source code within the same tool. That's definitely something really good.

The tool was developed for Agile project methodology, but I've noticed that there has also been a try to incorporate what is typically done in MS Project, which is for more sequential Waterfall projects. The problem with that is that it is half-baked for Waterfall projects. If you're going to do it, then either go all the way and allow us to use the tool for both or don't do it at all.

One thing we had to customize ourselves was to create the critical path. You can't do your project dependencies within the tool. We tried using the tool for a Waterfall project, and we had to find a custom approach to do that because. There should be some functionality for the reporting and dependency tracking for the Waterfall projects.

I have been working with this solution for two to three years.

So far, so good. It has definitely been sized appropriately for our use. We haven't had any issues with it.

We've only been using it for about three years, and so far, it seems to be able to adapt to our growth. We're maturing into it. We're moving in the direction of using it more, and I feel confident that it'll scale appropriately.

We have at least a hundred people using the tool. There are different degrees of people who are using it. Some people are using it in the read mode or view mode to keep themselves informed of where things are. We have some project managers who actually use the tool, and then we have a couple of administrators. I'm one of the administrators for our program. I have a couple of vendor or partner folks who are also administrators. We also have a development team that does some customizations on the dashboard and the Power BI reports that we do. These are pretty much different roles or layers that we have.

We do grant developers access to be able to make their own updates within the tool. Typically, project managers or scrum masters do that, but we also have some team members who are on these projects and have enough understanding of how the tool works and how we're using it. They are able to do their own reporting and their own updates on their statuses.

In terms of plans to increase its usage, we're moving in that direction. Most of our projects are done in Microsoft waterfall project management schedules, but we are being encouraged to move over to more of an Agile approach on our project methodology. Our mandate is that if you're going to do anything Agile, use the DevOps tool.

I have not interacted with them. We have a sort of layer for support. I have had to reach out to one of the three resources that we have. He is our true admin at the company who had to reach out to their support, but it has been seldom, at least from my experience.

I used Jira while working with a vendor that we had here for one of our projects. They brought that tool from their practice. We were doing that because we had not yet moved to DevOps. After they rolled it out at the organization level, the mandate was to stop using Jira and switch over to Azure DevOps. There are a lot of benefits to Azure DevOps over Jira, but Jira is the one that has a lot of market share on that side.

I wasn't involved in that, but I do know that, just like many tools, there is a learning curve that was associated with that. I have used Jira before, so I had more or less an understanding because it is very similar to Jira, but I know that for other people I work with, it was a completely new concept to use something like this.

For its maintenance, we have a small team. We have about three individuals who do the backend support. So, it is minimal. Obviously, if they have any escalations, then they do go to Microsoft, but we haven't had that happen. It was very minimal. There are plugins that are available to enhance kind of some capabilities of the tool. When we ask for that type of functionality, these three individuals have been able to implement plugins for us.

It is an Agile tool. We were using the tool calling that we were Agile, but we were really doing things in the Waterfall methodology. It was our square peg in the round hole, and that's where I realized that we didn't have the capabilities in DevOps to use it as a Waterfall tool, which makes sense because Agile is a different approach. We've evolved since then, and now, we're doing a bit more Agile when we use the tool. So, a tool is just a tool. There has to be that thinking alignment. Otherwise, it is a square peg in a round hole, and it doesn't quite fit. Your organization and your team have to understand that. Just using the tool doesn't make you agile.

The only problem we had was when we rolled this out, we didn't realize how Waterfall we really were. So, I had to go back and have PMs create additional data elements for us to capture what we really wanted to capture to report in Waterfall. Dependencies weren't tracked, and we had to go back. It almost felt like we had to do rework, and people weren't too happy about that.

I haven't used its mobile device capabilities, but that's definitely something that I would hope to evaluate in the future. 

I would rate Microsoft Azure DevOps an eight out of 10. Overall, I'm pleased with the tool, but there is definitely some room for improvement.

What I like the most is the DevOps Boards. It's easy to create a hierarchical project structure, assign tasks to people, and then track their tasks.

I also like the scheduling functionality.

I would like to automate notifications on sprint planning. When we are getting to the end of sprint planning, we would be automatically notified. 

Also, it would be nice to have a percentage complete. For example, if a task is in progress, how much of it is complete, how much is left outstanding. I'd like that to be something that the assignee fills in and that automatically reports back to me.

I have been using Microsoft Azure DevOps for six months.

It's a stable solution.

Microsoft Azure DevOps is scalable.

I have not contacted technical support.

Previously, I used Microsoft Project. We chose to use Microsoft Azure DevOps because I needed something that my stakeholders could access.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

The time it takes to deploy is dependent on the type of deployment. Deployment of software, or deployment of the project into the software? 

It took me a week to deploy the project into the software. It's approximately 800 PBIs.

Before implementing Microsoft Azure DevOps, I would suggest doing your research on how to configure it. It is a product that I recommend

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.