Why Azure DevOps?
Azure DevOps
DevOps is the union of people, processes, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to your end-users. Azure DevOps is a set of services that gives you the tools you need to do just that. DevOps practices that enable transparency, cooperation, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment become embedded in your software development life cycle.
Azure DevOps has everything you need to turn your idea into a working piece of software. Azure DevOps Services provides several features to assist you with application development from planning to deployment.
Azure DevOps has made my job a lot easier, from planning my project, monitoring the changes in the code to a change-set, streamlining / track the progress, testing, etc. to deployment and maintenance. It also implements some safety checks and policies that make it more resilient to mistakes and will enable faster iterations and continuous improvements.
“Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.” ~ Winston Churchill
Get Started
Sign up to Azure DevOps for free and start by creating a project. It gives us the provision to use any of the two version controls, either Git or TFS. The difference is that Git is distributed and TFS is a centralized version. Post which, you can start, configuring your workspace, and reviewing and sharing your code. We used visual studio to move our code to the azure repository. The other clients or IDE’s that can be used are Xcode and Eclipse.
Version controls help as it’s easy to change or delete a file in the wrong copy of code, potentially losing their work. Each team member takes a copy of the latest version of the codebase with them and works offline as needed. Developers can check-in their changes and resolve conflicts as necessary.
Once the project is created, one can collaborate with their teams by adding teammates to the project by inviting or giving them access. Choose your project, team, or page of interest.
Once you have access, connect your visual studio to Azure DevOps by connecting to the project from the team explorer.
From the Visual Studio Tools menu, select Options, then select Source Control > Plug-in Selection. Select Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.
From the project summary page, hover over service and then choose the page you want. To choose another project, choose Azure DevOps.
You would be able to add summary/documentation to your project, user stories, tasks and review the progress and the code as they are checked in. Boards are for organizing and managing the work. Categorize your work items based on hierarchy, like Epic, Features, User Stories, Tasks and Bugs.
Work items are cards on a board that are divided into columns. The columns represent the status of the work items contained within. The work status can be customized into cards. For example New, Active, on hold, Resolved and so on. You move cards from left to right on the board as the work gets completed.
Create dashboards for different purposes. You could have a dashboard for a project manager that shows the overall progress of the project or iteration.
Once a work item is complete, a developer could commit their code. For projects that have CI/CD implemented, the deployment process is just a click away. This can trigger a build which simply means that the latest code will be compiled or otherwise prepared for deployment. It can be deployed manually or automatically to one or more environments.
The whole process is so simple(agile) and easy to use as well. Found my clutter-free project management tool in Azure DevOps. I hope this piece of information on using Azure DevOps is helpful to you too.
