Creating a Comprehensive Azure DevOps Roadmap

Azure DevOps is a powerful tool that can help you streamline your development workflow, but it can be overwhelming to get started. To create a comprehensive Azure DevOps roadmap, you need to assess your current development process and identify areas for improvement.

Start by evaluating your team's current tools and processes, including source control, project planning, and continuous integration and delivery. Consider how Azure DevOps can help you automate these processes and improve collaboration among team members.

A well-planned Azure DevOps roadmap should include specific, measurable goals and objectives, such as increasing deployment frequency or reducing lead times. This will help you track progress and make data-driven decisions.

By following these steps, you can create a roadmap that aligns with your team's needs and goals, and sets you up for success with Azure DevOps.

A fresh viewpoint: Create Task Group Azure Devops

Delivery planning is a crucial part of the Azure DevOps roadmap, and it's made easy with the Delivery Plans extension.

For your interest: Azure Devops Delivery Plans

To get started, navigate to Boards and select Delivery Plans from the dropdown menu. From there, you can create a new plan by clicking the "New plan" button and providing a specific name for your plan.

A key feature of Delivery Plans is the ability to filter items based on their state. For example, you can set a criteria to filter out items where the state does not equal "Done".

Delivery Plans also allow you to add custom markers to track significant dates. For instance, you can add a marker for the fourth Friday from today, labeled as "Team offsite", with a magenta color.

The delivery plan extension also makes it easy to scale the calendar, allowing you to view multiple months at once with the "Zoom out" feature.

Here's a summary of the key steps to create a delivery plan:

By following these steps, you can effectively plan and manage your deliveries within Azure DevOps.

A product roadmap is a crucial tool for any project, and Azure DevOps offers a range of features to help you create one.

ADO offers features such as Epic Roadmap and Feature Timeline, which can be accessed by navigating the backlogs or boards.

You can define your product roadmap using queries, tags, and proper definitions of features and associating stories in ADO.

In ADO, stakeholders can create a roadmap by labelling features with tags, which are best suited for work allocation and differentiate different high-level features from each other.

Each feature will have corresponding User Stories as child links, which are achievable goals in the short term.

To create a new query in ADO, select the work item type as 'Feature' and the tag as the common tag you want to filter with.

To see the status of stories or features, create a sub-query to check the 'State' of the item.

For your interest: How to Group Clauses in Azure Devops Query

ADO offers a holistic view of the product's progress, making it a beneficial tool for building a product roadmap.

Here are the steps to create a product roadmap in ADO:

Azure DevOps is a great tool for managing and collaborating on software development projects, making it an ideal choice for building a product roadmap.

Aligning on goals and priorities is a crucial step in product development. Business stakeholders can use the product roadmap feature to achieve this alignment.

This feature enables crucial stakeholders to make data-driven decisions about the product’s development. They can rely on facts and figures rather than intuition or guesswork.

By using the product roadmap feature, stakeholders can ensure everyone is on the same page, working towards the same objectives. This leads to a more cohesive and efficient development process.

Here's an interesting read: Azure Cert Roadmap

Risk Management is a crucial aspect of any project, and Azure DevOps provides a robust set of tools to help you manage risks effectively. Azure Boards allows you to identify and track risks associated with your project, enabling you to take proactive measures to mitigate them.

By using Azure Boards, you can create and assign risk cards to specific team members, ensuring that everyone is aware of the potential risks and their responsibilities in mitigating them. This helps to prevent unexpected issues from arising during the project.

Azure Test Plans also plays a significant role in risk management by allowing you to simulate different scenarios and identify potential issues before they occur. This proactive approach helps to reduce the likelihood of costly rework or project delays.

With Azure DevOps, you can also use the Work Item tracking feature to monitor and manage risks throughout the project lifecycle. This feature enables you to track the status of risk cards and identify areas where additional attention is needed.

By integrating risk management into your Azure DevOps workflow, you can ensure that your project stays on track and meets its goals. This is especially important for complex projects where risks can have a significant impact on the outcome.

Take a look at this: Azure Devops Epic Feature

Azure DevOps is continuously improving its integration and features to meet the evolving needs of its users. The integration of Azure Boards and GitHub is being enhanced to provide a higher level of traceability, with features such as adding a link to a GitHub commit or pull request from a work item being added in 2024 Q1.

A significant investment is being made to improve the scalability of searching and linking GitHub repositories to an Azure DevOps project, set to be completed in 2024 Q2. This will help users manage their projects more efficiently.

Here are some key features being added to improve the integration and features of Azure DevOps:

Additionally, YAML and release pipelines are receiving feature parity, with auditing for checks, custom variables in checks, and checks scalability being added in 2022 Q4, 2023 Q1, and 2023 Q2 respectively.

Related reading: Azure Devops Pull Request Checks

Azure DevOps has been working to improve its integration with GitHub, a popular choice for developers. This integration will allow for better traceability, a must-have for many teams.

The existing integration has been around for a while, but it's about to get a major boost. Based on customer feedback, Azure DevOps is investing in several key areas to enhance the integration.

Here are the specific investments being made to improve the integration:

These investments will make it easier for teams to work across platforms and stay organized. By the end of 2024, teams will be able to create branches on GitHub repositories directly from work items.

YAML and release pipelines have feature parity, which means they have the same features and capabilities. This is a significant improvement over classic pipelines.

One of the key benefits of YAML pipelines is control over protected resources, which is in the hands of the resource owners, not the pipeline authors. This is a major security improvement.

YAML pipelines also provide scoped job access tokens, which are limited to specific repositories specified in the YAML file. This is another security feature that classic pipelines lack.

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The adoption of YAML pipelines has been significant for builds (CI), but many customers still use classic release management pipelines for releases (CD). The main reason is the lack of parity in CD features between the two solutions.

However, the gap in CD features is being addressed, and several improvements have been made in the past year. One notable improvement is in Checks, which is the primary mechanism to gate promotion of a build from one stage to another.

Here are some upcoming features that will help bridge the gap between YAML and classic pipelines:

Azure DevOps provides the necessary visuals to help teams stay organized and on track. The product roadmap feature allows development teams to visualize a product's progress and stay organized.

With the Azure DevOps product roadmap feature, teams can monitor progress toward delivering features and milestones. This feature is especially useful for startups and large enterprises looking to optimize their product development process.

Azure DevOps also offers a "Feature timeline and Epic Roadmap" plugin, available for free through the Microsoft Marketplace. This plugin provides a Gantt chart-like view of product progress, making it easier to keep stakeholders engaged in the product life cycle.

Here are some key features of the Azure DevOps product roadmap:

Additionally, Azure DevOps provides feature parity between YAML and classic pipelines, including auditing for checks and custom variables in checks. These features are available in the 2022 Q4 and 2023 Q1 quarters, respectively.