Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps is a powerful accelerator that enables organizations to create and improve products at a higher speed than they can with traditional software development approaches, thereby saving upon time, redundant efforts and total cost of ownership.

Overview

DevOps is a software development practice that promotes collaboration between development and operations, resulting in faster and more reliable software delivery. Generally known as a culture, DevOps help connect people, process, and technology to deliver continuous value. 

The software development process is mostly a highly manual process, which results in a significant number of coding related errors. This leads to the Development and Operations teams falling out of sync, which slows down the  software delivery, eventually disappointing the business stakeholders. Hence DevOps creates efficiency across all tasks involved in the various stages of development, testing, deployment and maintenance of software life cycle.

Bridging the gap between development and operations leads to increased visibility, more accurate requirements, improved communication and faster time to market.

Goals

• The goal of DevOps is to take end-to-end responsibility across all aspects of the project. Unlike more traditional methods of developing software, DevOps bridges the gap between development and operations teams, a gap that can create challenges and inefficiencies in software delivery, escalating the total cost of ownership of the software product or project—something that is often missing and can heavily impede the process of software delivery.
• Software teams commonly use agile development, which is a delivery approach that relates to lean manufacturing. The development is completed in short, incremental steps, leading to total completion. Although it is different from DevOps, the two approaches are not mutually exclusive—agile practices and its associated tools can help drive efficiencies within the development team, contributing to the overall DevOps culture.

Tools and Functionalities:

Azure Boards: Deliver value to your users faster using proven agile tools to plan, track, and discuss work across your teams. It also allows you to track work with configurable Kanban boards, interactive backlogs, and powerful planning tools. The key feature of unparalleled traceability and reporting make Boards the perfect home for all your ideas—big and small.

Azure Pipelines: Build, test, and deploy in any language, to any cloud, or even on-premises cloud infrastructure - typically includes hardware that is related to cloud services or activities, which is nonetheless located on-site at the client’s physical business location. Connect to GitHub or any other Git provider and deploy continuously. Run in parallel on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and deploy containers to individual hosts or Kubernetes.

Azure Repos: You can get unlimited, cloud-hosted private Git repos and collaborate to build better code with pull requests and advanced file management. Also get flexible, powerful Git hosting with effective code reviews and unlimited free repositories for all your ideas, which is, from a one-person project to the world’s largest repository.

Azure Test Plans: This helps us to test and ship with confidence using manual and exploratory testing tools. Improve your overall code quality with these testing tools for your apps.

Azure Artifacts: This is used to create, host, and share packages with your team, and add artifacts to your CI/CD pipelines with a single click. We can share Maven, npm, NuGet, and Python packages from public and private sources with your entire team. We can as well as integrate package sharing into your CI/CD pipelines in a way that’s simple and scalable.