What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure DevOps?

The solution could be made faster because it can be a little unnerving to browse through too many pages and press too many buttons.

The solution's roadmap and Gantt charts could be improved. We recently started using Azure Test Plans, and we're not seeing a lot of good dashboards in it.

Azure DevOps could be improved with more security plugins, especially for SaaS scanning and vulnerability scans.

One potential enhancement in Azure DevOps could be integrating more customizable reporting features, particularly for Power BI integration, to provide better insights into project data.

Requirements traceability must be customizable. It is very difficult to integrate the product with third-party tools. It is all proprietary. It's not very customizable. It should be managed better. The product is not sufficient to generate documentation automatically.

At times, our development work encounters issues, particularly when executing numerous CI/CD processes. Occasionally, these processes may experience delays or errors, often stemming from unavailable features or functionality in the cloud environment. Improvement in this area is necessary for smoother and more reliable operations.

There is only one key area of improvement for me. The new imaging thing is that there is DevOps, where security is important because it is always lasting. So, to integrate security in our DevOps, that would be nice.

While there is always room for improvement, I don't have any urgent issues or specific feature requests right now. I'm content with Azure DevOps as it is. Its functions are standard and easy to use for those familiar with such tools. However, the only thing that could be improved is the stability of the solution.

More features can be included. We'd like to see better Kanban templates and an audio-video chat facility. The bug reporting facility can be enriched; there is nothing to mark "passed" "failed" the test cases. The dashboard can be enriched. Related links must be visible on the dashboard for integration purposes.

The ability to extend work items was more flexible than it is now. Talking version control, one of our customers had some issues because they found it very difficult to manage more than 1000 repositories for one team project. Additionally, I would like to see more powerful dashboards that could be used instead of Power BI. Azure DevOps or TFS does not support graphics from hierarchy queries. It would be powerful to have because some customers don't have Power BI licenses.

I love Microsoft Azure DevOps for its simplicity and ability to manage the entire DevOps process. Its integration with third-party tools and robust security features make it a reliable choice for any organization.

Kellton providing DevOps services using Azure DevOps is a great way for organizations to implement DevOps practices seamlessly and with expertise. It's a powerful tool that enhances productivity and efficiency.

I would like to see improvement in the metrics and the dependencies. I would also like to see the option to define the dependencies within all teams in the same project. We have a team level, a program level, and a portfolio level. For the metrics portion, I would like to see some drag-and-drop features for the dashboards that would make it possible to aggregate data from the different teams. The plugin for the iteration walls can also use improvement as it does not work well.

It’s commonly observed that you cannot just change a company’s culture on command. You can influence the culture, shift it, and while it can evolve over time, it’s nearly impossible to just instruct all employees to simply change the way they think and act about specific things. The culture of any organization starts at the top of the leadership hierarchy and trickles down throughout, filling every empty space. It is essential that you get buy-in from the top management down to everyone in the pipeline. In order to do this, all involved need to understand the advantages the shift is going to have on the organization and on the team members.

The interface is very bad. It's an aspect that really needs to be worked on. It is going to probably get the developers to start abandoning work items. Our initial setup was quite complex. The presence of Microsoft in the country is limited.

Microsoft Azure DevOps needs to be updated in my time. In the application that I was managing myself in the deployment and support, it was updated every six weeks. The customer had new features or new batches. Batching is an update of the software. Unfortunately, some of the DevOps or some of the people that were working on that part, do not have the final experience from what customers have. This is something that I did with several teams in Microsoft. We told the product unit manager if you want to understand what is happening from a customer standpoint you need to start from the beginning. Having customers find a problem can not be the only way to find issues to resolve them. Testing is very important. Microsoft Azure DevOps tests very well. However, DevOps teams need to be aware of what they are impacting when someone updates anything on the system.

Integration with MS word is lacking. It would be useful to be able to import/export word document parts from/to requirements related work items. Or to build a report from text fields (e.g description and discussion or other custom defines fields) of a set of WI.

The price could be reduced. It is expensive, especially when it comes to infrastructure. The integration could be better. Being more technology-agnostic through ease of integration would be beneficial. Once you start working for Microsoft, you are frequently tied to Microsoft.

When we don't have some permissions, we have to research how to get them. It's not obvious. For example, deploying in order to do the connections, we need permissions for quotes or quotas. A specific quota might depend on an account. Sometimes we don't have the kind of support we need to work things out easily. When you deploy in Yaml Pilot, for example, you need to note in Yaml how to associate the piling, the release with the word items. We need more information about how this is possible and more flexibility to make it happen.

As for improvement, the first one is pricing. For us, luckily because we are partners, it's free. Microsoft gold partners do not have to pay, but if you're not a partner, the product is very expensive. The second would be that the tool should integrate with some of the competitors. It doesn't matter if it's a big market; it's difficult when you have to integrate with other competitor's tools, like JIRA, for instance. If you look at the competitor's tools, they integrate easily with Microsoft, but on Microsoft's side, it's not as easy. They have been changing, but still, there are a number of gaps there. I've got teams that want to use Microsoft Project, not only to control the whole process of the development but also to control the whole project and software. I think Project should be integrated with DevOps.

Microsoft Azure DevOps could improve by having better integration with other email servers.

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.

Compared to JIRA, I think Azure DevOps is missing some management elements, like some reporting features. It would be helpful if some things were clearer when we're adding attributes. For instance, sometimes we want to add some categories or attributes, and it's not so easy.

All of the tests of the applications are done on the mobile or web interface and it could be improved. The connection to Power BI could improve. Power BI is a very good platform for reporting and presenting processes, but a good engine does not exist to present the process development in time in Power BI. It's a typical business reporting tool.

Something that could be improved is the initial setup with the integration of ReadyAPI.

The only area that requires improvement is the interface.

Microsoft could focus on refining the reporting and dashboard elements of Azure DevOps to improve it.

We'd like to see an improvement in reporting across multiple projects. The same applies to improving program visibility so that project managers can get that pane of glass to assist with their work. It would be a big win for a lot of users as well as a good addition to the 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.

There isn't a requirement traceability matrix format. In ALM, we have a centralized repository of all the requirements in one place. But in DevOps, it works like a product requirement. In ALM we have the centralized repository of requirements where you can go and see the requirement coverage and discovery and so forth. But in DevOps, it has stories and test cases. Once that project is over, nobody is going back into that requirement. It's a good tool for development activity, tracking and getting all those metrics. If they can build up a requirement traceability matrix, then it would be great.

I’m not sure what needs improvement. I don't even think I'm using everything. There are still a lot of things on the testing side that I'm not using. That said, there's, there's a lot that it can do. I wouldn't even know where to get started on discussing what it needs or lacks. We did have some brief performance issues, however, that was due to putting everything on one epic instead of breaking a project up.

The dashboards need bigger with better extensions and layouts. There isn't a workflow related to the statuses on the dashboard. It only lists the statuses. You can have one started, and once done, but everything in between is only in progress and could be in any order you want, it lacks flow.

Some things, like project management, tasks, progress, and having work progress views, require us to use some external tools or to create our own internal tools. These are not native to DevOps. It would be ideal if, instead of searching for third-party solutions, they had these feature sets or capabilities included under DevOps. They need to expand the solution's offering.

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.

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.

Individually, the components and not quite as good as others in the market. For example, the DevOps test plan isn't quite as good as a Micro Focus ALM QC. That said, when you integrate it into that entire pipeline, it's better. Microsoft initiates changes so quickly, it's hard to keep up. It would be helpful if there was more documentation and more training to go with all of the changes. Chris: With Microsoft, I would prefer to have more test plans. It's very difficult to find individual test plan module training.

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.

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.

We haven't had too much time to really play with the solution and therefore it's difficult to really know if there's anything missing in terms of features. We need more time with it. The price could be lowered. It would be nice if it was cheaper.

Microsoft Azure DevOps could improve by providing better integration with other tools. It is very easy to integrate with Azure, but when you need to integrate with other solutions, such as Amazon Web Services, is difficult.

There could more integration with other platforms.

Integration and plugins for other tools could better. Like if you want to integrate the DevOps with other tools that are in the market. This could be for the engineering tools to check code quality, application security tools, and DevOps dashboard tools. They could also make the implementation easier. The test plan also has basic features that are not user-friendly. It should also have integrations with test automation tools. We need a test plan, automation testing, and EA-based testing.

I have not come across information for integrating this solution with others, such as ServiceNow. I am not sure if the integration would be straightforward to implement. There should be readily available information to accomplish these integrations.

When converting to DevOps, it was difficult to map.

It is not that intuitive. Sometimes, it is hard to find some of the functions. I would like to have an old-fashioned menu structure to be able to easily find things. Its environment setup is not very good. They should improve the way it is set up for different screens and make it easier to find functionalities and maintain team members.

I would like to see new features added.

The ability to integrate Microsoft Azure DevOps with other platforms and Microsoft products can be improved.

They should expand it from just a PC, software, or server development platform to other kinds of software or engineering systems so that it is not necessarily built around a normal PC with a server. I would like to see the ability to write my own scripts in my own compiled program or online. Right now, there are things that you can do in the user interface, but you can't do them programmatically and vice versa. I want to see them both. If I can do it in a script, I should be able to do it from the user interface, and if I can do it in the user interface, I should be able to do it in a script.

We are entry-level users when it comes to Azure DevOps. We haven't had to set up anything complex as of yet. So far, we are very satisfied with this service.

The testing environment and different pipelining concepts can be improved. It can also be more user-friendly. They can actually incorporate all those other features, current tools and have those mind maps. They could add some good analytic features. I think they can be more enriched with some good reporting features. They can also improve the designing tools.

There are some areas that need improvement such as tracking. There is not anything major that needs to be improved in the future, just minor adjustments are needed. The solution works well.

Requirements management is an area that can be improved. Integration with Microsoft teams would be a good idea.

The administrative capabilities of the tool need a huge improvement. Its Wiki and Reporting functions also need a lot of improvement. Their support can also be better.

Despite the fact that you can automate most of the things, you still have to produce some scripts. There are things that are not very user-friendly. The tasks are achievable, however, it's not easy. You have a lot of steps until you can get the thing automated. In the past, Microsoft DevOps was integrated with Microsoft Project. Out of the box. Right now, it's no longer that way. That would be interesting to have. It would be great if I could integrate with a human resource type of software that could control timesheets.

The communication could work better, especially for the development team. The important thing is that the tracker tools provide adequate communication, as do other tools. It seems to be lacking in DevOps and is an area which could be improved. We also need to improve publishing in production. In the future, we would like Azure DevOps to work with automated tasks regarding publishing. Better integration with existing source code is another area, which would benefit from improvement. The search repository could be more comprehensive, and visualisations could be optimised, further.

I am not suggesting this solution should be cheaper. I would like to see a bucket of licenses. for example, 10 licenses or 100 licenses that could be monitored to know how many of those licenses have been used. The price would be deducted accordingly. I should not have to contact Microsoft daily to request a license or two. There should be a mechanism in place where you are able to find out where you are out of 100 licenses, or that you have used 90 licenses in that year. I should be given a credit line of 10 licenses at the end of the year or at the end of the month. It should be easier to manage licenses, especially because it's in the cloud. You should know the usage and based on the usage, you should be able to make decisions.

I'd like to have something better for the test plan. The test plan seems to be really manual even now. There's a lot of stuff to do there, and it could be improved. Sometimes, it's also difficult for us to handle all the connections with iOS. iOS connections are really very difficult. We're using a different product, which is part of Microsoft, called App Center. But sharing from Azure DevOps to App Center has been difficult. They should try to improve things related to iOS development or iOS production.

I would like to see better integration and collaboration between tools. There are different companies offering different tools, and how well something is integrated contributes to the completeness of the solution. The platform needs to be updated because things are still in the process of change.

I have not been able to use the integration with automation features, such as test management automation, with a framework that is written in Java. Currently, Azure offers frameworks that are written in C#. I have not found anything in the Microsoft documentation to say that it supports other languages.

I think the templates could be improved. It's not easy making the jump from one project to another so we're now integrating using a different partner. I believe the price could be improved when scaling. It's a simple calculation, the number of users times $11, which is approximately the cost. But if you have a large number of users you should be able to reduce the per user cost the more you scale. I think it's something Microsoft could do for us.

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.

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.

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 think that they have some menus there that are not very well placed. For example, I was searching for some extensions in the marketplace and I couldn't find my way back to the console. It's not very well designed. The general user interface is nice. It's intuitive, but I had the luck to discover something that is not very well designed. The fact that I can't return back to the console is very strange. I couldn't find my way back. I had to log off and log on again and get back to the console in a very awkward way.

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.

The user interface could be improved.

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.

The test management section needs to be improved. It is easy to use but they can make changes such that it is more comfortable for the users. I would like to see a full-quality dashboard added. For example, if I am not using their pipeline then I would still like to see the dashboard available.

This product would be improved if the helpdesk were included.

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.

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.

Proper Gantt charting should be a feature that is included because as it is now, we have to create it ourselves. We would like to have an indicator of the percentage of occupancy. Suppose a person is working on two different domains, and we have 70% on one project with 30% on the other, it should be able to report that. As it is now, we have to manually enter that data. If this functionality were provided then it would make it easier for users.

The dashboard could be improved. Although there is flexibility in configuring it, there are some metrics that we have to configure ourselves. Improving the metrics that are readily available on the dashboard would be very helpful. I would like to see better integration with third-party solutions, where if they are part of the DevOps pipeline then the reporting could be made available on the dashboard. Having some form of check modeling integrated into Azure would be useful.

We're quite happy with the tool right now. We're not really using it too much. We are also just starting on it, to be honest, so what we've needed so far we've found that it offers. There isn't anything missing that I can see. One thing I would note is that it's hard to know what is included or not in the product. Especially when you begin to try and compare it to other solutions. When you go to a site like VersionOne, they tell you Azure DevOps doesn't have this or that, and when you go to Microsoft, it says VersionOne doesn't have this or that. They could do a better job of laying out exactly what is on offer so customers know going in exactly what they'll get.

There are certain areas in Azure DevOps that are better in other products. These are things that I need to more fully explore.

The solution could work to improve their reporting.

They do very frequent releases, there's a complete change in UI kind of stuff. Sometimes it feels like they change it too often. They fix issues and add new features quite regularly which is good. They leverage a lot of new features, new features get released frequently, and sometimes the change management on our side is a bit complicated because we'll see something and there's an entirely different way how it is presented. You need to get it all working again. Previously we asked them for more analytics on top of what they already had so that we could look at it comprehensively and see how the projects are progressing. They implemented these changes for us.

There is a lack of integration and portability with other tools and products. I would like to see better interoperability with the agile scaling frameworks. When I first started using Azure it was impossible to figure out how to do the configuration correctly. Perhaps there should be a configuration environment that hides some features and is not open for everyone. I find it difficult to find some of the features, although it may be that they are not enabled, or perhaps I have to take some time to better understand the tool.

Better integration with the Linux operating system would be an improvement for this solution. I would like to see more third-party plugins; by comparison, the open source solution, Jenkins, has thousands of plugins available. The Wiki for this solution is not very good. There is a problem when you want to run a release pipeline for an organization that needs enhanced security. There is no option to configure a dynamic login for a station that is running the tests. The only solution in the platform is to configure an agent that uses a fixed username and password login. There is no option to change the username or password for the login dynamically. If I want to run multiple tests, with different users, then I cannot do it. When it comes to running tests, it needs an option to use different users or authentications. This is a very important feature that is missing.

Non-functional testing such as security testing, penetration testing, and performance testing could be improved.

Azure DevOps is a very cross-platform product. One of the issues that I have currently with the company is that they are using two different parts of technology. They were using JIRA for their sprint work and they were also using Confluence, as well as other Enterprise software. I advised them that all their sprint planning, backlog work, and everything else, can be done out of Azure DevOps from one central place. I know the Microsoft team will always look at improvements because I know that they are constantly looking at improvements to products while listening to their customers and looking at a global scale. I'm keeping my ear to the ground, as I always do. The product keeps evolving and at the moment there are a lot of good parts There are petabytes of data. Anytime somebody does a pull request or anything else, Microsoft is notified about it. So if somebody, somewhere is always looking at that and watching, that can be a revolutionary product. It's a product that can continuously grow and evolve in time. Even if it is not yet what you call a finished article, it's a growing and evolving product. Everybody has a slightly different take on what solutions or what part of the solution they would like to be improved. You can always improve a platform. Microsoft is always listening to customers and they will bring out a new version. The platform is quite user-friendly at the moment because you can use any program or language with it. You can't say you need another program, because as far as I'm concerned the main ones can be integrated with Azure. The newer ones like Go, as well as older ones like Python, Java, and PSP, can all be integrated with that platform. I suppose when we hear about that release, I have no doubt that because Microsoft captures a lot of metrics and information that they monitor, like capturing data about what or how people use their product, they can see where the usage is and where they might want to remove a feature. That analysis and also comes from Microsoft's monitoring capabilities.

It is not clear what features have been added or enhanced since the last version. My customer used a previous version and it did not meet their expectations, so clarification with respect to the new version is needed on their website or other venues. I would like to see more customization available to the administrator. You need to change the workflow of the end result.

Information to make it easier to choose items from the marketplace (like MS verified), etc. Otherwise, every item requires a full InfoSec review.

* Enable more control on Application Insights integration to open different types of work items as this is area still need more enhancements. * Test management extension is too high to be paid on a monthly basis. * Test and feedback chrome extension still need more development as they are not very stable.

* It would be better to have a free-text query editor. * Product management/roadmap planning features are missing. * Parent Column is added in listings and we expect to see it in queries as well