Microsoft Azure DevOps Reviews

A common use case of Microsoft Azure DevOps is the use of work items and then connecting them to Git repositories and their updates. It is primarily used for item and code management.

The work items option is incredibly flexible.

There are multiple add-ons available.

It is easy to use.

The entry point is adequate.

When you compare with Jira, there is a lack of progress features.

I would like to be able to customize the product using add-ons or a similar mechanism.

Scalability is an area where they could advance and make changes.

Unfortunately, managing users in Azure is a very complicated issue. We also have a problem with one of their other tools, which is Teams. The Team messaging has caused us some trouble because they have what is called organization, in addition to the users, but it doesn't work very well.

Technical support needs improvement.

I would like to see scalability, dashboards, KPIs, measurements, and some visual management assistance improved in the next release.

I have been working with Microsoft Azure DevOps for one year.

We are using the latest version.

Microsoft Azure DevOps is a stable product.

This solution is used by 20 people in our organization.

It appears to be simple, but based on the work items and project management aspects, I believe there are few options for scaling it up in terms of dashboards and KPIs.

I contacted technical support about managing users in Azure. Unfortunately, they were able to resolve this issue for us.

We tried several times and we did not get the answer we expected to get.

I use Jira as well as TFS.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is simple to install.

Other than the initial setup, it does not require any maintenance.

It was implemented internally.

The majority of the components are reasonably priced. Testing is one of the more expensive components. When you compare it, it is approximately $3 per month for the other components and $45 or $50 for the Testing component. It costs ten times as much as the other components.

I would recommend this solution to others who may be interested in using it.

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

With the query feature, we have to group items, so it becomes difficult for everyone to understand it. It's easier in JIRA, which has filters and other query options. So, I think this query option should be there in the DevOps also. Also, I don't like the DevOps' boards at all. It's more complicated than JIRA, I think. So, DevOps can improve in terms of its boards, work items, and filters. 

Then there is also an issue with user access. We have about 10 to 15 users that we can add to DevOps. But only the first five users have basic level access, and the rest have stakeholder access. That means they can change the task status but not add or do anything. I think Microsoft should remove this restriction from DevOps. With the access restrictions, it's tough for us to add any status for our users or filter anything on the boards. So, Microsoft should add this functionality for the other roles as well.

DevOps is a stable solution.

It's average. It's not better than JIRA. It's average because many things need to be improved by Microsoft in all their products.

Setting up DevOps is easy. 

We pay for DevOps when we use it for our clients. But for personal and internal projects, we can use the free version. But there are restrictions on the trial plan. It should also be available for free use. However, the trial version of DevOps is free for only five basic users. So, I think it should be free for others also. And other extensions like test plan creation should also be available for the basic users, at least. We have to purchase the license for this.

We use both JIRA and DevOps. The main difference between DevOps and JIRA is the test cases. You can have test cases in DevOps but not in JIRA. And, DevOps has advantages in terms of executing those test cases. You can develop releases from DevOps but not from JIRA. At the same time, JIRA's jQuery is the best. I don't like the grouping and filtering in DevOps. 

I rate Microsoft Azure DevOps seven out of 10. I would recommend it to others. It's a nice and helpful tool.

We're using Azure DevOps Services for three things: First, for project management, second, for storing the source code, similar to GitHub Repository, and finally, we use it as our CICD build server or build environment, which builds for us and runs tests and so on. In general, these are the three main use cases for this product. We are large customers of Microsoft and we're on a corporate level with them. We pay extra for support. I'm a software engineer manager. 

I like that this solution is all-in-one, a one-stop-shop, it's the killer feature. I haven't seen anything that comes close. I guess GitHub will be close soon, but that's it, there's really nothing right now for that full integration. Other solutions require three tools so this is really a great feature. The solution has a better user interface and better CICD tools compared to what we used previously when we ran TeamCity. I think it scores higher on most things, including better developer ergonomics. Since it's Git-based, there's no training because everyone uses Git. I've found it to also be very customizable so that on all points it's better. This is an important tool for us. 

This solution is not as good as Jira when it comes to project management and I think they know it, but it's good enough. I'm very used to it now, so I can work more quickly, but I've had colleagues who are very Jira-focused and they don't like Azure DevOps at all. When it comes to the handling of tickets or tasks or the product backlog, Jira is much more customizable and more intuitive. It's an area that Microsoft could improve. 

The instructions could be a little better. We are doing some weird stuff where we're building some things, including embedded firmware. It wasn't super intuitive to set that up which was an issue although it's something minor and we managed to solve it. I just expected it to be a little easier, although it's not what the solution is built for. We're going a little out of the normal use case. It is a little clunky compared to Jira and hosting your own builds could be a little easier.

I'm aware that they're putting money into GitHub to add more features around vulnerability scans and statical analysis and so on, basically taking on cloud and what have you, as well as Vericode that we are using. It would be great if it was built into the tool. I get things from other vendors that are provided out of the box, and it would be awesome for me to have that with DevOps. 

I've been using this solution for several years. 

The stability of the solution is good. We've had a couple of dashboards out and they have a nice page share where they show what's out and what's not. A few months back they had some issues with the Active Directory and we were pretty much locked out of some things. We lost Teams for a while and we use that a lot in Azure DevOps. It was quickly fixed. Otherwise, I'm very happy with the stability. 

The scalability of the solution is good and there's no maintenance required. We're a small operation and we could grow by a factor of 10 and it wouldn't be a problem. This is an SaaS and if you need to take care of it, there's something wrong. We use the solution extensively and soon we'll have almost every piece of software, including all our test automation and embedded firmware there so we'll be increasing usage. 

The company previously used TeamCity, and I have used Jenkins in the past, the grandfather of everything. Azure DevOps is nicer. Jenkins is very configurable, but a pain. I like Azure a lot more and I think this or something like it, GitHub Actions, for example, is the future.

The initial setup is very intuitive. What I think they could work on is the whole permissions model where you have projects and other things which require permissions and which is not very intuitive. You can do almost everything but I want a more granular permissions model that's also easy to maintain. I don't quite like the way it's set up so there's some work to be done there. I think I'd rather do it in text because it's hard to see everything clearly otherwise. If you have a complex permissions system, it's complex to set up and it's not super intuitive. Compared to AWS, which is a very different system, that aspect of Azure is not very intuitive.

I work in an engineering department so we didn't feel the need to get any help with deployment. If you read the manual, create the sandbox, and test it out you're able to roll it out. It's not that hard. 

We're not paying a lot for this product. As developers, we have a Visual Studio license which is basically free. That's how their licensing model works. Then we have a number of stakeholders who need to do edits in the system, but not work with code necessarily. I believe they're paying $5 a month per user. We also have users who only need to read things and don't need code so I set that up for everyone who needs it. We're probably paying a few hundred dollars per month altogether. That's a minor cost for us; we're not currently hosting anything on cloud, so it's a small cost compared to hosting a solution. 

We ran into a few things where we had to pay more because of the number of concurrent building agents. We had capped it low and the developer was unhappy so we paid a little more to get what we needed and that's been good. I don't like it when you get a big bill and you don't know about it. 

I'm somewhat critical of the documentation for certain things, but overall, the documentation is really good. In general, Microsoft is really good at documentation. It's worth taking a few hours to read it and then you'll know a little about how Access works. If you set up a sandbox, you're not going to destroy anything and you'll learn by trying things out. I would still read the documentation and go in parallel so you can at least know enough and be aware that it's safe to get in there.

We are very heavy users in creating small projects and then sometimes deleting them because they weren't useful but I like that model. Create a little sandbox and go build. We have done our own workflows and they are always tested in a sandbox before going live. That would be my suggestion. 

I rate the solution eight out of 10.  

The plugins are the biggest thing. I like how Visual Studio is designed as a shell application, and then the plugins make it do what you want it to do.

Microsoft could improve Visual Studio by making it easier to find the plugins you need to get your job done. Maybe they could implement an AI search instead of a simple tech search. Sometimes, people come up with a catchy name for something, and you don't know how it's spelled. For example, a developer might come up with a packet wizard and spell weird, like P-A-K-I-T.

I've been working with Microsoft Visual Studio since it first came out in 1997, so about 24 years.

Visual Studio is very stable.

I don't think scale applies to Visual Studio because it's a developer tool. And I haven't had a lot of experience with massive projects where multiple teams are working on the same source code. I've only worked on a team of a few people.

I think support is probably pretty decent, but I've never had to use it. I just look at Visual Studio's source code to troubleshoot it. 

The setup is pretty straightforward. Visual Studio runs pretty fast.

I'd say Visual Studio is a nine out of 10. If you're thinking about adopting Visual Studio, research the kind of functionality you need. The nice thing about Visual Studio Code is that it's a modular design. So if you're working on a strange language that has a different syntax, you can just get a plugin that'll format your code for you based on the language it's in.

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.

We are using Microsoft Azure DevOps for the repository for Git.

We are migrating to the on-premise version of GitLab. We do not use any advanced tools. We are planning to do more with DevOps and are evaluating other tools to incorporate in our process of development.

We use the functionality of Git for our development. We do not use the other tools that are integrated into the DevOps. We use it because we have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft.

Microsoft Azure DevOps integrates well with other components, such as Synapse, which is a data warehouse tool of Azure. It is a framework platform for BI and integrated with other tools, such as Power BI.

I have been using Microsoft Azure DevOps for approximately three years.

The solution is stable.

There are other solutions available that are open source and free, such as GitLab.

We are switching from Microsoft Azure DevOps to GitLab because we have the infrastructure and we are migrating part of our service to on-premise which includes our VMs. We decided to install GitLab because it is open-source, free, we can install it in-house, and we have some members that have experience with that product. We are now starting to migrate some projects.

I would recommend this solution to companies that use the incorporated services provided, it is very good to adapt as a DevOps tool.

I have not used the solution extensively enough to give the solution a higher rating.

I rate Microsoft Azure DevOps an eight out of ten.

We are using it for feature delivery.

Before we started using Microsoft Azure DevOps, we didn't really have a mechanism for tracking delivery against a feature or feature delivery. It has really helped us in visualizing what we need to deliver and get consensus across cross-functional teams that it is the right thing to deliver.

It allows us to prioritize an organization-wide backlog, which has really reduced our delivery time for complex projects. In fact, we are in the middle of a transformation program. We managed to kick off the program in a month and start the delivery cycle within six weeks of conception. Before adopting this tool, it would have taken us three to six months.

It is a really easy way to define all of the features that you need to deliver. You can link those features to epics and break them down into user stories. You can also assign the user stories into sprints for doing your product improvement planning.

It is a really simple tool for prioritizing a backlog, assigning that backlog into sprints, and then tracking the delivery by using sprint capacity, points of time, the velocity of the sprint, etc. It is really useful for agile delivery.

There are a couple of things. The tool has a logical link between epic feature, user story, and task, but when you try to generate a report to show the delivery progress against a feature, it is not easy. To see the percentage completion for a feature or progress of any delivery, it is not easy to draw a report. 

It doesn't give you a high-level view of your roadmap for planning a roadmap for delivery and identifying how far you are on that delivery path. There should be the ability to create a product roadmap and then based on the delivery of the user stories, link to the features against that product. We should be able to roll up a view to see how have we progressed against our targets.

When you're accessing it via the web, it works nicely, but it doesn't work for a while if you're trying to access the board via a tablet or mobile device. A lot of the time, we just want to quickly update a task or check a delivery against a sprint by using an iPad or phone. It is not really user-friendly on those devices. It works very well on the laptop but not on other devices.

I have been using this solution for 18 months.

We've had very few issues with Azure DevOps.

There were no issues.

We also use Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect. For business process modeling where you are linking different objects in the modeling domains, Sparx is the most appropriate tool. You cannot model business processes in Azure DevOps.

Azure DevOps is more appropriate as a delivery tool for building out the feature roadmap and defining user stories, tasks, features, etc. It is well suited for taking the data and building it into a delivery pipeline. These two tools don't speak well together. A solution was developed to integrate these two, but it doesn't work very well.

It was super simple. We just needed a username and a password. The board was pre-setup by our administrator. In fact, we didn't even have to go through any real training, even though the training was available. It is really intuitive to use.

Its pricing is reasonable for the number of features that you get and the functionality that you can utilize for the agile delivery, which is what we are using it for. I found it extremely cost-effective.

I would rate Microsoft Azure DevOps an eight out of 10. It is the primary tool that we've been using. It works very well.

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.