What is Azure DevOps and Who Should Use It

Software has become the backbone of modern business success, and every business is trying their luck in building the best one that meets their needs. As an IT manager, you may have found it difficult and exhausting to manage the huge backlogs of specialised software orders from clients. Azure DevOps can help you meet every order without compromising your quality and security. 

Easy automation and team management features reduce the repetitive manual tasks that free up your team to develop more innovative ideas for your clients. This increase in productivity from the same staff drives profits and maintains growth. You can leverage the latest tools by Microsoft for your developmental and operational needs to release quality projects. 

What is Azure DevOps

Microsoft Azure DevOps is a suite of practises and tools capable of delivering better performing software applications or products through the integration of numerous development and operations functions. Numerous organisations use DevOps to improve communication and collaboration between their teams to adopt automated and programmable infrastructure deployments. 

DevOps consists of the following vital services:

Azure Board

A tool that allows organisations to conduct Agile planning, portfolio management and processes management. Your entire team will have more visibility of the progress of your projects as it helps in: 

• Integrating your business requirements from inception to delivery. 
• Planning, managing and tracking progress of every member of your team. 
• Tracking backlogs and user stories. 
• Increasing team collaboration and facilitating discussion sessions.
• Creating dashboards and tracking the status of completed tasks. 
• Configuring and sending notification alerts as issues are created, changed or modified. 

Azure Repo

A cloud-based private Git repository service that serves as a tool for codebase for version control. Azure Repo has the features such as: 

• Creating branches and pulling requests. 
• Seeing history, tags, and discussion about every source code version. 
• Supporting all Git clients.
• Integrating webhooks and APIs.
• Automating with built-in CI/CD capabilities. 

Azure Pipeline

A cloud service deployment system can connect to any Git repository to gain access to the source codes. Azure Pipeline combines Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery to test and stitch your code for immediate shipping. It also assists in:

• Building applications on any platform or language code to increase your deployment speed. 
• Leveraging a more comprehensive range of community-generated builds, tests, and deployment tasks. 
• Linking various extensions such as Slack or SonarCloud.

Azure Test Plans

A manual test management tool provides developers solutions to test their plan, execute and capture data regarding defects in the system. Azure Test Plans is equipped with: 

• End-to-end traceability as tests and defects are automatically linked to customer requirements, and the application builds in the testing phase. It also helps developers track the quality of the requirements and act accordingly. 
• Azure test plans consist of three types of test management artefacts: 
  • Test Plans 
  • Test Suites 
  • Test Cases
• The browser-based test management solution is used for exploration, planning manual tests, and user acceptance testing. 

Azure Artifacts

A fully-integrated management service for organisations that use CI/CD pipelines daily where a project can create and share Maven or Python package feeds from various public and private sources. Azure Artifacts also offers a hosting facility that seamlessly integrates universal packages with CI/CD pipeline. 

Each of these Azure DevOps services is open and extensible, allowing users to use them for various applications, regardless of their framework, platform, or cloud. Azure provides cloud-hosted agents for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, while the workflows enable native container support and Kubernetes deployment options. Moreover, with DevOps, you can benefit from the flexibility of adding customised agents according to specific requirements. 

Benefits of DevOps

Your organisation can enjoy the following benefits by adopting Azure DevOps to assist its teams: 

1. Speed
   By using DevOps, you can do tasks at a speed that allows you to innovate faster, adapt to changing markets, and become efficient in delivering your software products. 
2. Rapid Delivery
   DevOps lets you increase the pace of your releases that enables you to improve your product quickly and gain a competitive advantage. 
3. Reliability
   CI and CD pipelines let developers ensure the quality and quantity of updates for their applications while introducing the necessary changes to the infrastructure to make reliable deliveries at the right frequency to maintain the user experience. 
4. Improved collaboration
   The DevOps Model allows developers and operation teams to collaborate better by sharing responsibilities and combining their workflows to reduce inefficiencies and save time. 
5. Security
   Automated and integrated security testing tools allow developers to adopt the DevOps model without any security sacrifices. 

Conclusion

Azure DevOps is the simplest way to accelerate your processes that ensure the continuous delivery of high quality and reliable software products for your clients. It takes away the manual labour procedures by automating them through continuous integration. You can also use containers with Microsoft Azure that helps in isolated automated testing of products before release. 

Not sure how to start with Azure? Take help from our Microsoft Azure Specialists to start using Microsoft Azure today to automate exhausting manual tasks.

Clint Shiels

With over 20 years in the technology space and a background focused on Microsoft and Security, my methodology is to understand business requirements and outcomes first and foremost then set out a roadmap and delivery plan to achieve these through advisory and modern workplace delivery services.