Blog / Time To Code / We’ve Spent 208,000 Hours in Azure DevOps. Here’s What We Learned
No spam, no B.S.
Unsubscribe if you’re not happy.
Sometimes, when looking for the right tool for a job, you just have to turn to the experts.
If you wanted to cook a meal you’ve never attempted to make yourself, you might ask an experienced cook for advice. If you planned to renovate your home but you didn’t know the difference between a miter and a chainsaw, you’d probably want to ask a handyman or contractor for help (no, seriously).
And if you were considering implementing Azure DevOps for your software team, but weren’t sure about the benefits, tips, and tricks for getting the most out of Microsoft’s toolstack, well, you might come to us.
Our team has spent a combined 208,000 hours in Azure DevOps. We think you could consider us experts. And that’s why we’re here to offer all our advice — why you should use Azure DevOps, how to use it effectively to get the most benefit, and how it can help you manage DevOps best practices within your teams.
Take it from the experts — we love Azure DevOps so much we built a tool specifically to integrate with it. Read on to see how your team can get the most out of Azure DevOps, too.
Azure DevOps has evolved over time.
In its current iteration, it’s the rebranding of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), which is the online version of Team Foundation Server (TFS). Since the beginning, it’s been a source code management tool meant to allow teams to share and work on code collectively.
Today, it’s a powerful tool for teams who use DevOps — collaboration between development and operations teams that uses agile methods to create great programs and launch them quickly.
A quick Google is all it’ll take to find people all over the internet who will tell you why your teams should use Azure DevOps. For the most part, none of them are wrong. We also think you should use Azure DevOps. And after spending 208,000 hours using it ourselves, these are our reasons.
Since its early days, collaboration and sharing have been at the heart of Azure DevOps. Azure DevOps provides a central location for storing and managing code, ensuring that everyone on your team has constant access and can work together.
Azure DevOps integrates seamlessly with a wide variety of industry and community tools. And if there’s a functionality you need that Azure DevOps doesn’t offer out of the box, just check the marketplace — odds are good that there’s an extension available that will give you what you need, even if it requires integration with one of Microsoft’s competitors, like Slack. That freedom of customization is one of the biggest reasons Azure DevOps is such a powerful tool.
Too many teams put too much time and effort into creating and organizing pipelines. Azure DevOps comes with its own clean, customizable hierarchy of organizations, projects, teams, and work items, ensuring smooth pipelines with minimal management on your part. That means your team can focus on what it’s good at: software development.
Making the most out of Azure DevOps means effectively using all of its components:
How your team makes the most of each of these will be largely individual — different teams operate in different ways. But the benefit is that a mish-mash of different DevOps tools from companies that may be competing with one another generally don’t communicate well with one another.
Plus, this means having one comprehensive solution that’s all based in Azure DevOps, rather than a collection of systems that everyone on the team needs to learn individually. And each Azure DevOps component can replace other tools, giving teams a more seamless, integrated workflow.
DevOps as a philosophy comes with a number of best practices that encourage collaboration among your team members to deliver high quality programs quickly. Adhering to best practices is a lot easier when you have the right tools, and that’s where we think Azure DevOps really shines.
These are just a few common DevOps best practices that are made a lot easier by Azure DevOps tools.
DevOps Best Practices
It doesn’t actually take 208,000 hours in Azure DevOps to see the powerful capabilities of these tools. But once you start using them, you’ll likely find that spending hundreds of thousands of hours in Azure DevOps is much easier than you think.
No spam, no B.S.
Unsubscribe if you’re not happy.
nad
12-19-2020 22:21