How does the engineer understand Azure DevOps?
Dig deeper into Azure DevOps from an engineer’s perspective.
While the DevOps culture has already brought a revolution in how software is developed and delivered to the market, Microsoft DevOps solutions act as the icing on the cake. By providing better visibility into the software development process, DevOps helps you prevent code errors from taking place and improves the product quality. As a result, your product reaches the market faster as compared to the traditional software development approaches. However, since Azure DevOps comprises various stages, concepts and components, implementing it needs the right expertise and exposure of DevOps. In this article, we have tried to dig deeper into Azure DevOps from an engineer’s perspective and will cover:
- What is Azure DevOps?
- Azure DevOps Services
- The Top Features of Azure DevOps
So, let’s begin the journey.
What is Azure DevOps?
To understand Azure DevOps service better, let’s first dust off our knowledge of the DevOps culture.
DevOps culture is a software development practice in which the Development and the Operations teams work in cohesion to deliver better quality software at quite a faster rate.
Since, the DevOps culture links people, processes, and technology, it tends to deliver continuous value. Earlier, in the traditional software development approach, there existed a huge gap between the Development and Operations teams that acted as an impediment to the smooth and faster software delivery process. It also impacted the product quality at times. However, with the introduction of the DevOps culture, this gap has been bridged. By putting more stress on automation, the DevOps culture reduces the number of errors.
Now let’s come to the point and discuss what Azure DevOps is. Software as a service (SaaS) platform, Azure DevOps allows you to develop and deploy software efficiently and faster with the help of the end-to-end DevOps toolchain it offers. Azure DevOps cloud service is an assortment of various services instead of being a single program.
Azure DevOps: The Services
#1: Azure Boards
It is a set of proven agile tools that helps you plan, track and discuss work across the teams. Through this service, you can deliver value to your users easily and quickly.
#2: Azure Pipelines
Through Azure Pipelines, you can build, test, and deploy with CI/CD, which is compatible with almost any cloud, language, or platform. It also allows you to connect to GitHub or any other Git provider for continuous deployment.
#3: Azure Repos
The service proffers an unlimited cloud-hosted private Git repository. Through collaboration, better codes could be built with advanced file management and requests can be pulled.
#4: Azure Test Plans
Azure DevOps services comprise manual and exploratory testing tools through which you can not only test but also ship with confidence.
#5: Azure Artifacts
The service allows you to create, host, and share packages with your team. You can also add artifacts to your CI/CD pipelines with just a click.
#6: Extensions Marketplace
Through this service, users can access extensions from slack to SonarCloud to one thousand other apps & services built by the community.
Azure DevOps: The Top Features
Azure DevOps has several features that make the task of the development team a lot easier, some of which are:
#1: Dashboard Control
Microsoft Azure provides the dashboard feature for DevOps as well through which users can easily navigate to different project areas. They can also add and manage dashboards apart from configuring dashboard widgets.
#2: Planning and Monitoring
Azure DevOps systems also support the planning and monitoring of work. With the help of various work items, it offers users can monitor features, tasks, requirements, bugs, user stories, and much more. The system gives you access to a broad spectrum of boards and backlogs that support the main agile methods like Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban. It also allows you to add and update relevant work items, manage product backlog, plan sprints through sprint backlogs, visualize the workflow and update the statuses using Kanban boards.
#3: Improved Source Control
The Azure DevOps systems support two main source control types that are Git (distributed version control system) and Team Foundation Version Control often called TFVC (centralized client-server system). It makes it easy to add and manage Azure Git tags. Users can also view the change history by reviewing, downloading, and editing the files.
#4: Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
The CI/CD practice is also supported by Azure DevOps. Developers can automate several design processes using Azure pipelines. They can define builds and their steps, create various test instructions, and manage simultaneous releases.
#5: Manual and Exploratory Testing Support
The test features by Azure DevOps allow manual, continuous, and exploratory testing that include end-to-end traceability, real-time charts for tracking test activity, workflow customization, and criteria-based selection.
#6: Azure Cloud-hosted Services
With Azure, the DevOps teams can make use of various cloud-hosted services that facilitate application development and deployment. They can themselves use these services or along with Azure DevOps.
#7: Integrated Collaboration Services
Here are the features of the Azure DevOps system that allow the teams to collaborate across with whole range of Azure DevOps features & functions.
- Team dashboards
- Analytic views, Analytics service, and Power BI reporting
- Project wiki
- The ability to request and manage feedback
- Discussion within work item forms
- Alerts and change notifications are managed according to the user, team, project, or the organization
- Linking work items, pull requests, commits, and other artifacts supporting traceability
The Final Words
Building a DevOps culture is as complex as it sounds, however, with the right set of tools & services offered by Azure, the task becomes easy. Moreover, you can integrate with the most common open-source and third-party tools & services throughout the Azure DevOps workflow. In short, Azure DevOps has a tool for every phase of the application lifecycle. If you are looking for supplemental support related to Azure DevOps database migration service or Azure DevOps migration service, the good news is several reputed managed services providers that offer Azure migration services also offer DevOps migration for Azure. The best part is they provide 24*7 Azure DevOps support services.
