What is Azure DevOps?

DevOps — the combination of the teams of software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) — has become the go-to methodology in IT today. The goal is to provide a constant stream of improved software releases quickly and with fewer errors. Ultimately, developers turn to DevOps to shorten the overall development lifecycle.

App creators have many DevOps tools to choose from, and the sheer number is enough to make anyone’s head spin. To that end, we are devoting some time to one of the better DevOps tools available, Microsoft Azure DevOps.

What is it?

Let’s begin with the basics: what exactly IS Microsoft Azure DevOps? It’s a software as a service (SaaS) platform that offers users an end-to-end DevOps toolchain to develop and deploy software.

Azure DevOps is not a single program but instead consists of the following services:

• Azure Boards: This covers agile planning, work item tracking, and visualization, and reporting tools.
• Azure Pipelines: This is a language, platform, and cloud-agnostic CI/CD platform with support for containers or Kubernetes.
• Azure Repos: This offers a cloud-hosted private Git repository, with pull requests, advanced file management, and other benefits.
• Azure Artifacts: The artifacts in question provide developers with integrated package management, including support for Maven, npm, Python, and NuGet package feeds from either public or private sources.
• Azure Test Plans: This service provides an integrated, all-in-one planned, and exploratory testing solution.

What are it’s benefits?

Azure DevOps provides DevOps teams with powerful tools.

Dashboard control:

• Using the DevOps dashboard feature, you can quickly navigate to different areas of the project, add and manage dashboards, and configure dashboard widgets.

Improved Source Control

• Azure DevOps systems support two popular types of source control: Git (distributed) or Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC), which is a centralized, client-server system. You can add and manage Azure Git tags, review, download, and edit files to see change history.

Place and track your work

• Azure DevOps systems provide you with a couple of types of work items used to monitor features, requirements, user stories, tasks, bugs, and more. For planning purposes, you can access several kinds of backlogs and boards to support the main agile methods: Scrum, Scrumban, or Kanban. You can add and update relevant work items, manage product backlog, use sprint backlogs to plan sprints, and use Kanban boards to visualize the workflow and update statuses.

Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD)

• Many developers employ the practice of CI/CD, and Azure DevOps supports them. By using Azure pipelines, developers can automate many of the design processes, including defining builds and their steps, creating test instructions, and manage simultaneous releases.

Support for Manual and Exploratory Testing

• Azure DevOps’ test features facilitate manual, exploratory, and continuous testing, including workflow customization, end-to-end traceability, criteria-based selection, and real-time charts that track test activity.

Integrated Collaboration Services

• The feature that enables teams to collaborate across with the entire collection of Azure DevOps features and functions:
• Team dashboards
• Project wiki
• Discussion within work item forms
• Linking work items, commits, pull requests, and other artifacts that support traceability
• Alerts and change notifications managed per user, team, project, or organization
• The ability to request and manage feedback
• Analytics service, analytic views, and Power BI reporting

Azure Cloud-hosted Services

• Azure provides DevOps teams with cloud-hosted services that support application development and deployment. These services can be used by themselves or in combination with Azure DevOps.

Competitive Advantages of Azure DevOps

Let’s take a look at how Azure stacks up to similar DevOps tools and services.

Jenkins

• Although Jenkins is open-sourced and is excellent for asynchronous development, it has issues with plug-in compatibility, the need for workarounds for basic requirements, and a comparative lack of support. While Jenkins is easier to use overall, this simplicity limits its usefulness.

JIRA

• JIRA is a top-rated application lifecycle management (ALM) Suite that has advantages such as automatic notifications, sprint planning, and customized dashboards. However, users experience problems with project administration, permissions, comparative difficulty in creating lists of versions, and weak reporting.

GitLab

• GitLab is another web-based, open-source, DevOps lifecycle tool. In a side by side comparison, Azure DevOps has every feature that GitLab has, and then some. GitLab especially comes up short in supporting other commonly found test formats, reporting, and integration with other tools and extensions.

TFS

• The TFS application lifecycle management (ALM) suite has respectable functionality and builds management features. But on the downside, it is hampered by a dashboard that doesn’t is overly customizable, a test interface that’s not very intuitive, and a price tag that runs a bit high when compared with other project management tools.

These comparisons aren’t meant to imply that Azure DevOps is perfect because, in the final analysis, no product or tool is. Additionally, some organizations may have specific requirements that are best served by another DevOps tool. What stands out with Azure is the comprehensive set of tools and features which enable DevOps teams to run projects from start to finish from one provider. That being said, Azure is highly agnostic, so teams can work with other tools and services if they choose.