Azure DevOps Roadmap

06 January 2021 at 10:00 by ParTech Media - Post a comment

You would have heard this often - 'Change is inevitable and it is the only constant in this world. Now imagine a world without change. Tough right? It is not even possible to think of something like that.

But on the flip side, not every change is welcomed by everyone. Some may feel hard to adapt while others may take advantage of it. Don't you think it is useful to know the change that is coming your way so that you can keep yourself ready to face it and avoid any last-minute surprises?

Imagine this in the field of the software industry. Let us understand this better with an example. Partech owns an application that has many takers. As a tech company, there would be a pipeline of changes that Partech is planning to accomplish in the coming days. So, will it not be a good thing to provide visibility to the customers about the plan? Yes, and that is exactly what Azure DevOps is doing.

Let's see in detail about the Azure DevOps roadmap.

Table of contents

  1. Definition of Azure DevOps
  2. Feature roadmap of Azure DevOps
  3. Conclusion

Definition of Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps is a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) offering from Microsoft. Azure DevOps houses the Product Backlog, Sprint board, Build and release pipelines, test plans, code repository, dashboards, etc.,

Feature roadmap of Azure DevOps

File comparison in PR review

Right now, Azure DevOps has an option to show the difference in the files modified by the users. To improve it further, the team is developing a better comparison viewer with options to see the full file tree. This would come in handy for users who are coming from GitHub.

Ability to copy dashboards

Dashboards are available in Azure DevOps where users can get the visibility of a team's progress through charts, widgets for agile practices, and the ability to monitor code activities. But, what if the format of the dashboard is the same for multiple projects? In the present day, you to manually create each of them individually. Azure DevOps team is coming up with a feature to provide an option to copy dashboards.

A tool to migrate from classic to YAML based pipelines

Azure DevOps provides options to achieve Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment using the build and release pipelines. Right now, they have two ways to create them, one through a classic user interface way and another one through YAML. Since YAML is the latest and advanced version, users are slowly migrating their pipelines. But there is no direct mechanism provided for this. Azure DevOps is working on a tool that can be used to migrate classic pipelines to YAML based.

Classic Pipeline

Support Markdown editing

Currently, there are many long text fields in Azure DevOps boards such as comments, descriptions, repro steps, etc., For styling them, users need to use the options that are provided when they start typing in the field. Azure DevOps is coming with a plan to introduce markdown editing so that it will be easier to style the texts on the go by using the special characters which will be defined by Azure DevOps.

Enabling preview from working

Currently, Azure DevOps provides options to preview images from the attachment section of the work item. But, it does not provide options to preview word, excel, and pdf files. Instead, it asks the users to download them and view them from their machine. Azure DevOps is coming up with a plan to preview word, excel, and pdf files.

Permission Log

Azure DevOps is planning to provide an option that would be useful for the administrators to export a file that contains the information about the groups and users in the organization along with the way the permission has been assigned to them.

Limit the visibility of organization settings

Today any member of the Azure DevOps project can view information such as the list of users, projects, usage information, billing information which is not useful for all the users. Also, the organizations want the ability to restrict the ability to view all these for only a specific set of users. So, Azure DevOps is planning to roll out a feature in which the administrators can restrict the access of the organization settings to the required users.

The immediate effect of group permissions

Currently, changing permissions at the group level takes close to an hour to reflect in Azure DevOps. Azure DevOps is working on a feature to reduce the waiting time and apply the changes with immediate effect.

Managing Personal Access Token

Azure DevOps is currently working to provide REST API support for creating new PAT tokens, rotate, renew, and expire existing ones.

Upstream publication latency

Azure DevOps is currently working on the feature to reduce the publication latency for private streams. Right now, it takes 24 hrs for the feeds to be visible for consumption.

Improvements in YAML editor

As Azure DevOps sees a rise in the usage of YAML based pipelines, they are planning to bring improvement in the YAML editor to ease off the creation and editing process. Also, they are going to achieve this with authoring and YAML templates.

Pausing YAML pipelines

Azure DevOps is planning to provide an option to pause the active pipeline with predefined points inside a stage. Using this feature, users can pause and carry out validations. Based on the results, users will be able to continue the pipeline activities.

Consumption of parallel jobs

Azure DevOps is working on a feature to provide analytics on the need for parallel agents by showcasing the number of waiting jobs in the queue, how often there is a need for having parallel jobs, and which project or pipeline is maximum utilizing the parallel jobs. This data would help the organizations determine the need for parallel jobs.

Conclusion

With the help of the feature roadmap of Azure, organizations can plan things and try not to overstrain or duplicate the effort in achieving something similar to that kind. By having a look at the roadmap, organizations can plan and prioritize their needs and workitems in the coming days.

Latest