The productivity of software development teams has been one of the most critical challenges faced by enterprises in modern times. Microsoft leveraged 15 years of its learnings, tools, and investment into this product – Azure DevOps - and rolled it out for businesses, big and small, to enable developers to ship superior-quality software faster.

DevOps allows enterprises to accelerate delivery while still delivering reliable products & services. DevOps is about bringing people together through shared common goals, increased collaboration, and a focus on improvement.

Launched in October 2018 by Microsoft, Azure DevOps (formerly Visual Studio Team Services launched in 2006) is a SaaS platform that offers a full spectrum of DevOps toolchain for building and deploying software. It also integrates with many available tools on the market and has successfully addressed the specific needs of many customers worldwide, irrespective of their language, platform, or cloud. Azure DevOps is rich with inbuilt functionality that empowers teams in effective project management by automating their workflows.

Azure DevOps enables the integration, testing, delivery, and deployment of applications and services to any cloud (using Azure DevOps Services) or on-premises (using Azure DevOps Server). It integrates with other widely used services like Campfire, Slack, Trello, and more.

Azure DevOps Components

1. Azure Boards: Deliver value to your users faster using proven agile tools to plan, track, and discuss work across your teams.
2. Azure Pipelines: Build, test, and deploy with CI/CD that works with any language, platform, and cloud. Connect to GitHub or any other Git provider and deploy continuously.
3. Azure Repos: Get unlimited, cloud-hosted private Git repos and collaborate to build better code with pull requests and advanced file management.
4. Azure Test Plans: Test and ship with confidence using manual and exploratory testing tools.
5. Azure Artifacts: Create, host, and share packages with your team, and add artifacts to your CI/CD pipelines with a single click.

Azure DevOps Pipelines

• Classic: Helps you create and configure your build and release pipelines in the web portal with the classic editor. Push your code to the version control repository, which triggers your pipeline & runs tasks such as building/testing code.
• YAML: Create a Change Management Plan – Highlight release dates, users impacted, training plan - we will help you define these.
  Create a Communication Plan – Share information repeatedly through lunch and learns and other office activities. Leveraging our predefined templates and industry experience, we will help you develop a robust communication plan.

Conclusion:

Microsoft Azure DevOps has everything you need to build and modernize your applications with speed. It supports agile methodology enabling reduced release management costs, improves reliability and team productivity, reduced time to market. It also integrates seamlessly with other cloud providers and tools.

Explore our whitepaper on “Azure DevOps Best Practices” to learn how DevOps simplifies and accelerates continuous delivery of products.