Microsoft Azure DevOps Benefits

Ali Raza Pirwani - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Vice President at Bank Alfalah Limited

Azure is one of the few project management software solutions that provide a clear view of project standing, and sprint of product backlog as well. 

As far as my organization is concerned, we use this software for managing the project life cycle where we raise change request forms here and the IT developer provides the solution and from there we can conduct the UAT and sign off for closure. 

The entire product life cycle is being managed with task assignments so broader and a clear understanding of scope is provided by this software and the organization can better understand its current progress.

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Usman ur Rehman Ahmed - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud App Dev & Services Pre-Sales Lead for MEA & APAC at Systems Limited

When implementing CI/CD workflows using Azure DevOps, we leverage its standard model as our foundation. However, we also integrate third-party tools such as Jenkins, NGINX, Argo, and Tecton, all of which are compatible with Azure DevOps. This interoperability greatly benefits us, as Azure DevOps seamlessly integrates with these tools, enhancing our workflow capabilities.

Azure DevOps has significantly enhanced our team's agile project management and planning processes. One notable capability is the rapid setup time of a new Azure DevOps system, often completed within minutes, eliminating the need for extensive setup hassles. Additionally, once established, the platform has proven to be highly robust, with no instances of downtime or performance issues encountered. This stability extends over the years, with projects maintained on Azure DevOps for two to three years remaining consistently stable. This reliability ensures that projects don't slow down or require intricate management, as Azure DevOps provides a seamless and dependable solution.

Azure Boards has significantly enhanced our team's collaboration efforts. We have a long history of using the platform, even before it was branded as Azure DevOps, with various name changes over the past five years. Boards are a particularly powerful feature, offering ready-made templates that serve as a solid foundation for project management. Additionally, the platform allows for customization, enabling users to tailor boards to specific project needs. This flexibility extends to offering different boards for different management levels, catering to both team and executive needs.

Azure Test Plans have significantly improved the quality and efficiency of our testing process by incorporating test cases and methodologies seamlessly into the suite. It serves as a one-stop solution for our testing needs, empowering both developers and QA teams to identify and address issues that impact overall quality.

Since adopting Azure Pipelines, we've witnessed significant improvements in our release management processes. It serves as a one-stop solution for CI/CD, offering maturity and flexibility. We have the autonomy to configure our CI/CD pipelines according to our specific needs, whether we choose to implement continuous integration (CI) only or both CI and continuous delivery (CD), either manually or automated. While there is potential for enhancement in providing more out-of-the-box CI/CD templates, overall, teams have not encountered any significant issues with Azure Pipelines.

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MM
Software Engineer at Mercedes-Benz AG

Azure DevOps supported our agile project's sprint planning and management. It introduced automation, which is still a little bit immature. But our previously manual tasks are now automated, and we've transitioned from deploying ITFAX applications to containerized deployments using images. These are just a few examples.

Moreover, Azure DevOps facilitated our team collaboration and tracking of work items in our projects. We've got the backlog, the boards, the item backlog items, you know, you can see what's approved by the product owner, what's on hold, what's in progress, what's developed and deployed to whichever environment, nine product or product and stuff like that. 

So, it's been visible for all to see, from my manager to product owners, technical product owners, developers, and testers; every stakeholder has visibility.

Ever since we adopted Azure pipelines, we saw faster releases. Something that would take us two or three weeks to deploy; we can do it in a couple of hours now. So, the primary benefit is definitely faster development and deployment cycles.

It boils down to - increased customer satisfaction. Quicker releases to testing and production environments - that's the benefit, that's the impact.

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Buyer's Guide
Microsoft Azure DevOps
March 2024
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Jeremy Chen - PeerSpot reviewer
Installation Engineer at CTCI

Azure DevOps has been instrumental in facilitating agile project management and collaboration within our team. We extensively utilize all the features offered by Azure DevOps, enabling us to seamlessly handle tasks such as test management, project management, software defect resolution, and source code management throughout the software development cycle.

We are leveraging the capabilities of Azure Repos for our source code management needs, finding them highly advantageous for our workflow.

Azure Pipelines have significantly improved our deployment process by enhancing automation. We utilize Azure Pipelines to standardize our build process, ensuring consistency in our artifacts and maintaining high-quality outputs. Additionally, it has enabled us to enhance our testing procedures, leading to more efficient issue detection and resolution.

Azure Test Plans have significantly influenced the quality of our releases. Acting as our test engine, they have played a crucial role in ensuring the quality of our software. Post-release, all identified defects are thoroughly addressed, and developers are requested to provide corresponding test cases to prevent recurrence of issues.

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Mitch Tolson - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Robotics at Fresh Consulting

It becomes a single source of truth for whatever operation is implemented within it. You can have your product definition in there from a requirements management standpoint and then log in bugs and defect management and RPNs and a bunch of other things. You have this single source of truth as they provide an analytics service, and then also easily tie into Power BI. It's really easy to just look at the health and overall operation of your entire business from a single source.

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HarunRashid - PeerSpot reviewer
Principle BI Architect at Allshore Staffing

Switching to Azure DevOps initially posed challenges, but as our team became familiar with it, we found it greatly improved our daily operations and productivity. Its streamlined processes made our development workflow more efficient.

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Alba Jamile Diaz - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder at Premium Consulting SAS

We are a team of 12 consultants specializing in this solution. We have customers with approximately 200 users each, and we have been able to reduce our customers' deployment time by using Azure DevOps or TFS.

Additionally, our customers have been able to measure and improve their development process, by generating some KPI's as 'average defect fixing time', 'effort deviation', and 'velocity' among others, due to the continuous use of Azure DevOps.

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GP
Project Manager at a government with 10,001+ employees

I don't have any metrics on that. I can only give you anecdotal evidence. 

One of the benefits of using a Kanban board is that it keeps track of how long tasks take. People would hold onto tasks for three or four weeks before we started using the Kanban board. However, once we began using the Kanban board, it became more visible. 

We also realized that we needed to divide the tasks into smaller sections, and the tasks lasted an average of a week. As a result, the throughput and velocity increased simply because the Kanban board made them more visible.

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Syed Fahad Anwar - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal System Developer at HHRC

We use continuous integration and continuous deployment through Azure DevOps. With CI, we gain the advantage of fully approved code merges, as demonstrated in your demo. This ensures clarity on which releases are destined for production. With continuous delivery, we seamlessly deploy to both our test and production servers.

Azure DevOps supports our agile project management and sprint planning processes. This enables us to release sets of features more efficiently and quickly within the Agile framework. Additionally, DevOps facilitates the approval of features, further streamlining our release process.

When using the Agile template, we have visibility into what tasks are available, in progress, upcoming, and completed. This comprehensive view allows higher management to easily track the current status of tasks, including which ones are being worked on and which are finished.

It significantly enhances the testing phase of our software development lifecycle. Previously, after development, we deployed our software to a common QA environment for testing. However, now with Azure Test Plans, we can create isolated environments for each solution using virtual machines. This isolation helps us identify and address issues specific to our product, without being hindered by environment-related issues. With continuous integration through CI/CD pipelines, once our build is completed and approved, it automatically deploys without manual intervention, streamlining the process further.

Since adopting Azure Pipelines, we have observed significant improvements in our release management process. Previously, the process involved various stages and multiple approval steps, leading to fragmentation. However, with Azure DevOps, the entire process is streamlined, allowing for seamless transitions from board check-in to release approval within the same solution.

Before using Azure DevOps, we couldn't release as swiftly as we can now. With Azure DevOps, our ability to release has significantly improved. This increased efficiency means we can release more versions of our product, leading to higher productivity and the shipment of more artifacts than before.

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EC
IT Project Manager at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

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. 

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AG
Technical Engineer (Retail Group) at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

It has absolutely improved the way our organization functions from a development lifecycle point of view. It has enabled teams to be more Agile and flexible.

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reviewer1850940 - PeerSpot reviewer
Freelance at Self

This solution has offered lots of improvements. The most important improvement was to provide continuous delivery with high-quality software. It helps with version control with automation using CI/CD components. It also helps to develop software using the agile methodology. 

The ability of different disciplines (development, operations, and infosec) to achieve outcomes has been great. Increased focus on test automation and continuous integration methods are helpful. It helps release new features continuously into large-scale high-availability systems while maintaining a high-quality end-user experience.

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Carlos Arturo Quiroga Quiroga - PeerSpot reviewer
Digital Architecture Corporate Leader at Banco Pichincha

We had a lack of governance over DevOps processes, so we had some quality issues in the end when we released the software products. DevOps has helped to resolve those issues.

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PS
Application Architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

In our organization, Microsoft Azure DevOps helps senior leadership go in and check the project status and how much effort has been put in by the development team. They can also pick, choose, and add features to be used by the development team. It's like a backlog management tool that helps improve and support projects. 

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MM
DevOps engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The reporting and analytics features of Azure DevOps significantly improve our project visibility and decision-making process. This includes a reporting dashboard and integrated monitoring capabilities. We utilize Prometheus and other tools for monitoring, and Azure DevOps seamlessly integrates with various solutions, ensuring flexibility in usage while maintaining consistent concepts.

Azure DevOps has significantly enhanced the productivity and efficiency of our development team, especially considering our high volume of daily deployments. Developers find it invaluable for tracking changes, generating logs, and creating reports effortlessly. Automation of deployments is particularly crucial for us, given our extensive environment with over two thousand fifty-three instances. The most significant benefit is the reduction in time and effort, leading to a decrease in human errors.

Integrating our pipeline with Jenkins is seamless, particularly for code management using Git repositories. Additionally, for cloud-based applications, we already have native network integration with Azure Active Directory.

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WD
Group Product Manager – Billing and Payments at MultiChoice Group

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.

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Rodrigo Bassani - PeerSpot reviewer
Head Of Technology at Elogroup

We have the histories, and are able to estimate the efforts of each story. It means that I can measure it from each developer and I have the match from each developer. We can also check it from the lead time to see whether there are any problems in storage that may not be mature. It gives us control. 

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VS
Manager Systems Engineering at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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Abhay Rawat - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Engineer at Hanu Software

The benefits from the use of the product in our company stem from the ease that the tool provides when working with different teams. The product is also helpful in assigning tasks to team members easily. Following step-by-step processes, including testing and integration of the testing phase, all the other areas are easy with the use of the tool.

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Himanshu  Rana - PeerSpot reviewer
Delivery Service Engineer at Hanu Software

Azure DevOps integrations with other tools have streamlined our workflows.

The centralized code repository is a major part. We store code and collaborate, and everyone can see what others are doing and what code they're adding. We can review the code and make changes if needed. 

The same code used for implementation is visible to other team members, allowing them to contribute. Additionally, the Azure board interface helps create tickets and assign workloads, keeping everyone informed about progress.

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IG
Senior Director at Cloud Technovation

I'm familiar with Azure DevOps in the sense that my group directive has based the administration, architecture, and development on Azure. So whichever hat that I need to wear at the time that's the one I can wear.

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LO
Manager of Information Technology Services at a government with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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KA
Chief Operating Officer Executive at a cloud provider with 11-50 employees

Azure DevOps allow you to create a bridge for maintenance and support, directly to the client. We can forecast tasks and the number of hours a task will take and can compare it with how long a task actually takes. The Timetracker function allows us to put all this together. Before Azure DevOps, we had difficulty predicting how long tasks would take, considering all the parts that must work together.

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BG
Chief Digital Officer (CDO) at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

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

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Murat Gurkas - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Owner at ZettaLABS

We have team members in different locations of the world. Azure DevOps is the main communication tool between the product owners, UX designers, and developers.

Its configurable dashboard offers various display options for the stakeholders of the project.

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AS
Technical Sales Manager at Skhomo Technologies

Our technical sales staff and business development people need to know how far the developers are on any product that we're developing. DevOps makes it easier for you to see how far along they are with the work because they have a repository where they store everything. There is a portal where you can see what has been done, what has been tested, what is working, and what isn't. I have a huge dashboard with an overview of what the development team is doing from an executive point of view.

I know exactly what they're working on. If the team is falling behind on a project, there's a project management module where I can see exactly what was supposed to be delivered and what hasn't been. 

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RM
Release Engineer at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

Microsoft Azure DevOps has helped our organization from having completely automated builds. The developers can send their own code to QA without needing a release manager or lead or IT person moving the code over.

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DB
Vice President at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Time to Market: Teams deliver more in less time.

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DH
Technical Architect at Dwr Cymru Welsh Water

Allows for source control and CI/CD pipelines while linking back to the work items on the Kanban board.

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RV
XBRL Specialist at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It has improved the team cooperation for building, developing, and releasing systems.

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MS
Lead DevOps and Release Engineer-L2 at ITWORX

Azure DevOps helps us to implement all our DevOps practices with a complete end-to-end cycle starting from code commit till the production deployment including continuous feedback.

This enables us to release the silos between the teams and enhance collaboration. Also, it gives us more control on the project delivery lifecycle and to fix the issues more earlier than before as we are aligned and working on one integrated system which can give us reports about any piece of info.

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WG
DevOps Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Before we used Azure DevOps, our team used to promote the code manually. What they did was publish, copy the files and paste them on the server or run lines of code to get our services in production. That takes a lot of time. With the pipeline we're using, that time was reduced by ten times. We're ten times faster now.

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GP
Principal Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

We use the CD/CD for all of our deployment lifecycles.

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Buyer's Guide
Microsoft Azure DevOps
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Microsoft Azure DevOps. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.