Microsoft Azure DevOps Reviews

We are using this solution for CI/CD projects, for Scrum, Agile planning, testing, and business management system solutions. 

We are also using it for continuous integration, and continuous delivery of DevOps.

I am also using the Git Repositories, which is the main source control for me in the organization. We were using it on-premises and now planning to move it to the Cloud.

They are calling it repository and they are supporting an old protocol, which is a popular protocol called Git repository.

The most valuable features of this solution are the CI/CD pipeline, and the testing automation.

It's good that they are bringing more options to this environment, and to deploy to virtual machines.

The testing agents needs to be improved, they need to work on it.

They can enhance the areas related to continuous integration and build automation. They can add more technologies for the build.

The integration with the Azure infrastructure as a code and include more templates for infrastructure as a code in the continuous integration phase and the build phase.

They can add more flexibility to the continuous deployment.

Artifact management is also an area that needs some enhancements.

I think automation and integration with the CI/CD lifecycle it's good but it's using agents.

I am using a different tool for testing automation because I have not found any use cases on it. This feature is not covered. I'm using only testing and business management. I'm not using the testing automation feature that is provided by Azure DevOps.

I would like to see more integration with other platforms and more flexibility.

They have to add more features such as schedules and more flexibility in the platform. This will allow me to build my space and time based on the schedule and based on a calendar.

I would also like to see a release calendar so that I can plan my releases based on my sprints. 

This is required and it would give this solution more maturity. Between Scrum, Agile Planning, or Project planning with the build and deploy prophecies.

I have been using Microsoft Azure DevOps for three years.

We are using the latest version of this solution.

It's a stable solution. We have not experienced any issues.

It's a scalable product. We have more than 50 users in our organization using this solution.

I plan to continue using it in the future.

Previously, I used TeamCity, Jenkins, I used Chef, and many other technologies.

The initial setup is straightforward, it's a cloud service, so it's plug and play.

I would recommend Microsoft Azure DevOps for other users who are interested in using it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for our Agile teams, however, we started off using it with our executive suite. Our executive team now meets in sprints every day. Sometimes it's a short 15 minutes, other times it can be up to an hour. We have two-week sprints and daily scrums associated with it. We've also rolled that down from the executive. We've got seven formal Agile teams running throughout the organization across our businesses. We probably have at least 40% of our staff now trained in Agile and using DevOps to execute the projects.

As an Agile team, we're now able to move much faster than we could, even pre-COVID.

Typically the sprints themselves and managing the tasks have essentially eliminated our need for reporting. That in itself has had a huge effort on the number of meetings. In the past, you would almost wait a month before you could get all the executive teams together. Now, we've got meetings daily. Due to the regular meetings, we're utilizing daily scrums and two-week sprints, and we've been able to move a lot faster than we've ever had before as far as initiatives. 

Frankly, throughout this whole COVID situation, being able to respond the way we have to some of the changes that were going on has been amazing. I don't think that would have happened if we weren't an Agile team.

There are a lot of features that we could probably work with a bit differently as we learn more about the tool. Right now, we're just really using it from a task management perspective. We've only been using it a year. There may still be more to learn and unpack.

Some of the queries, the way they're built, need to be looked at. We need better query tools.

Being able to report back to boards, to regulators, and the activities and stuff would be helpful. The queries do require somebody else to actually write them. There should, however, be a way to make things a little simpler in that space. Right now it's on us to figure out how to get better at making queries effectively and in such a way we're just not reporting on tasks complete.  

We track the associated feature story. In many ways you can actually go back and see the story, and see the progress you've made on initiatives due to the fact that you can see all the decisions that have been made along the way. If there's a way that person could dig into that and pull more information or insights, that would be very helpful as it would assist us in improving future projects or even help us forecast on an existing project. 

I use the solution daily. We launched it in the company in January. We've been using it across all our Agile teams here for 12 months here.

The stability of the solution is very good. I haven't had issues with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's a reliable solution.

The solution's level of scalability is good. We're a smaller organization. We've only got 300 people in total, and out of those, probably 40% of our entire staff use the product. About 120 people probably are in there on a daily basis. That's everyone from executives down to programmers. It's extremely cross-functional across our organization.

I haven't had to reach out to DevOps themselves personally, so I wouldn't have experience there. However, if we ran into any issues, my technology teams would contact them.

We didn't previously use a different solution. That's why we looked for an automation tool. We switched to DevOps mostly due to the fact that our development team was utilizing DevOps as part of their own Agile operations. A number of teams were also already sort of experienced. There are a number of individuals in the company who were experienced that way, and we had homegrown support in some ways when we launched it. It just made sense to go with DevOps as opposed to bringing in something new.

The initial setup wasn't complex. It was pretty straightforward. We didn't run into any issues that complicated the process of implementation.

We did look at Jira briefly, however, it didn't look that different from DevOps and we knew many of our team members were already comfortable with this solution so we didn't pursue it.

We're just Microsoft customers. We don't have any business relationship with the company.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using.

I'd strongly recommend the solution to other organizations. I can't see us ever reversing back now after being on this for a year.

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's relatively easy to use and it does what we need it to do.

We use Azure DevOps to place our corporate servers into the cloud. We perform evaluations in the cloud for clients. Occasionally, we provide a hybrid solution in a specific cloud. For corporate work, we usually use a different cloud. With Microsoft Azure DevOps, as with any DevOps, it is not always possible to identify specific use cases. How do you identify a specific feature from a hundred requirements into a specific use case? It is very easy to lose detail. Traditional teams and ways of working methodically for safety-critical systems are not always prepared to handle that. It is important to be able to handle hundreds of detail-oriented requirements.

Azure DevOps is now used for safety-critical systems, whereas in the past the traditional approaches were used in requirements management. This is more like the traditional waterfall model. Improvement is always unique to productivity. That's why we switched to Microsoft Azure DevOps. The software teams prefer it to IBM.

We can eliminate some of the middleman processes. In the process, we are merging DevOps with development and operations. So developers act like our operation team as well. That concept is a great exchange. It brings a high level of visibility. It helps the team and department cohesion, which helps to improve productivity. 

It also includes a high level of traceability and elimination of some of the unwanted silos in productivity. Testing and transparency need to be defined within the boundaries. If a backlog occurs, you should be able to group them as a whole. This means there is a backlogging to the team, as opposed to individual areas. Each area needs to be visible to other areas, at all times.

Microsoft needs to consider ruggedization and addressing specific disciplines. Fundamentally what I mean by that is you cannot merge everything. It should be able to handle the different types. There is ecosystems engineering, and there is software applications engineering. There is a need to bring these teams together, but the disciplines don't integrate very well, and so it won't work. For example, there is expertise in an area, and they tend to view the project from their own perspective. 

For example, the software UI/ UX team needs to view it from the UX perspective. Application engineers need to view it from the application viewpoint and the engineering perspective is different again. Although we need to be cohesive in our approach, we need to keep some boundaries as well. The idea of containers arises, such as those provided by the open source software product Kubernetes. We need to containerize different disciplines and then merge them. As a manager, I should be able to ask the formative team to focus on their creative section, and that their task is completed. In the Application layer, you also focus on their requirements and you establish traceability. Other teams may also be involved in linking to the overall requirements.

I have been using Azure DevOps for one year. It has been used in the company for about two years. It is used in the cloud and on-premises, as a hybrid cloud solution.

We implemented on-premise as a hybrid solution, and on the cloud.

I would give Microsoft Azure DevOps a six out of 10. Microsoft Azure DevOps is not perfected yet, as it needs to be more user friendly. If it can achieve that it will eventually reach a 10.

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.

We are using Microsoft Azure DevOps for tracking the requirements and tracking the issues.

Any issues that we have, are tracked and logged.

Also, we check the developer's workload.

It can be used for different purposes as well. For example, it can be used by software companies and different software teams for collaboration.

What I like the most about this product is that it's free and it's secure.

You can easily assign it.

It integrates well with other Microsoft products, such as Outlook.

If we experience a login issue, it sends a notification to one of my developers and you also receive an email notification, ensuring that there is no way that a developer can miss working on it or miss seeing it in emails.

The user interface could be improved.

I have been using this solution for approximately two years. 

It's a stable solution, we have not experienced any issues.

We have not had to scale it, as we have a very small team with only four members who use this solution on a daily basis.

We have not had to contact technical support. There hasn't been a need, it's very simple.

If you have any issues, you are sent a link through email, you click on the link to address your specific requirements and close it.

You will receive an email notification to confirm that the case is closed.

Previously, we were using Microsoft Excel. We decided to use Microsoft Azure DevOps because it allowed us to assign tasks and get a notification.

The initial setup is simple.

It was easy to deploy and within a day, I was able to learn it and work on it.

I did not use a vendor or an integrator, I did it on my own. It's a Microsoft product and we all use Microsoft.

Microsoft Azure DevOps is free for up to five users and allows you to track a maximum of three projects.

I would recommend this solution. It's a good tool and it's free.

Instead of spending money on premium tools, you can at least start with Microsoft Azure DevOps and then upgrade it slowly.

You can learn how to use this tool in less than a day.

If you have Microsoft 365, this comes with it for free.

It doesn't require any maintenance.

I would rate Microsoft Azure DevOps an eight out of ten.

We primarily use Azure DevOps for the early phase of software development projects. We don't use it for building the software. Rather, it is for development support. It handles management of the features, the composition, the definition of requirements, and checking our requirements against the use cases. 

Since it is a cloud product, it is constantly updated and not the responsibility of the user.

The quality of the user interface is very good.

It is a well-integrated product in terms of the development lifecycle. There are different functional areas from the requirements to finish including test management, product development, and deployment. I do not personally make use of all of these components together, but I understand from my colleagues that make wider use of it that everything integrates nicely.

It lacks integration with Office 365. It would be very useful if it had better integration with Microsoft Word because we would like to be able to define the priority requirement document and add it to different stages of the backlog. Currently, it is difficult to do this. There are some third-party products for this but they are either quite expensive or do not function properly.

I would like to see the requirement management links between work items improved.

An API to develop custom functions would be useful because we work with a large integrator that uses TFS, the on-premises version, and have seen what they do. One of the advantages of it is that you can develop using the XML approach to customization. Essentially, the customizability is more in-depth. This could be done, even without going to the code level, if they provided an API or and SDK. Although the interface currently used for customization is good, we sometimes find it limited. It would be more complex to use but also allow for greater potential.

I have been using Azure DevOps services for two years.

This is a stable service.

I would say that it is scalable. On a recent project, we had a lot of users and did not experience any issues in terms of performance.

I have only been in contact with technical support on one occasion and they gave me a good and prompt answer. From my experience, I can say that I am satisfied.

I do not personally have experience with other products, although the company has some experience with Jira.

In summary, this is a good product but I would like to see better Office integration and API support.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We normally use DevOps. On the application, everything has gone DevOps, however, we don't use the functions. All applications developed there have gone under Azure or AWS. We normally develop them to be able to not be dependent on anything, so if we want to deploy them in another environment, we can deploy them easily. If we want to use it in Azure, we use it in Azure. If we want AWS, we use it in AWS.

I like the CD pipeline. It's the most valuable feature for us. It's so easy to integrate into the CD/CI environment. I mostly love that one.

The initial setup is quick and easy.

The functions have too much dependency right now, so it makes it really, really hard to upgrade and make a change in the code. 

If you want to use the DPR it's a bit harder due to the fact that it's only 30 days.

We've been using the solution for a year and a half at this point.

The stability of the product has been good so far. I can't say that I've witnessed glitches. There aren't bugs. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable, as far as I can tell.

We don't have any issues with the scalability of the solution. If we need to, we're able to scale.

We've never contacted Microsoft for technical assistance. 

We are Microsoft partners. We have several Azure experts on our development team, and we have a tech that came from the US and did the training for us. We have a very strong understanding of the product and therefore we don't need help with troubleshooting or anything of that nature.

We also currently use AWS, however, I prefer Microsoft's solution as it's a bit easier to use overall.

We did not find the initial setup to be complex. The implementation is straight forward. 

Deployment is quick and typically only takes a few days or so.

We have ten people that handle maintenance. They are in different parts of the world. We have two in Australia, for example, and two in the USA.

The cost can get pretty high if you aren't paying attention to what you are doing.

We're partners with Microsoft.

I'd highly recommend Microsoft, and I recommend it more than any other solution. Everything is very simple and straightforward. The only worry for some organizations may be the cost. You need to be really, really careful.

I'd rate the solution overall nine out of ten. I think it's really, really great. If the functions were a bit better, I'd give it a full ten out of ten.

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.