Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System) is an agile development product that is an extension of the Microsoft Visual Studio architecture. Azure DevOps includes software development, collaboration, and reporting capabilities.
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Modern Requirements4DevOps
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Modern Requirements4DevOps is a fully-featured Requirements Management tool built into Azure DevOps. By partnering with Microsoft, Modern Requirements is able to offer a fully integrated solution within Azure DevOps, TFS, and VSTS. The Modern Requirements solution provides the ability to: Create documentation without leaving an Azure DevOps project Construct Diagrams, Mockups, and Use Case models that the user can connect requirements directly to Build…
N/A
Pricing
Azure DevOps Services
Modern Requirements4DevOps
Editions & Modules
Azure Artifacts
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Basic Plan
$6
per user per month (first 5 users free)
Azure Pipelines - Self-Hosted
$15
per extra parallel job (1 free parallel job with unlimited minutes)
Azure Pipelines - Microsoft Hosted
$40
per parallel job (1,800 minutes free with 1 free parallel job)
DevOps is much more user friendly than Git itself. There is a more GUI-centric interface, tighter integration with the Azure / Entra architecture. For those of use in the Microsoft-sphere, it really is excellent for code-centric project management. I rate this as an 8 because it does not seem quite as well suited for fully functional / non-code project aspects in implementation. Nor does it have customer / end-user portal / front end for easy reporting and insight.
We tried the Modern Requirements4DevOps AddIn to see if it brings a added value to our development. I have to say that I would distinguish between types of projects in which it is beneficial and in which it is probably "over engineering". Certainly, bigger development projects with higher complexity are more suitable than small and not really complex projects. However, for the bigger projects Modern Requirements4DevOps definitely helps to deal with the complexity as it adds way more contextualisation to the various entities. It really helps to understand which requirements led to which action in a diagram or task during development. It helps to control the complexity and inform all team members along the project.
Flexible Requirements Hierarchy Management: AZDO makes it easy to track items such as features or epics as a flat list, or as a hierarchy in which you can track the parent-child relationship.
Fast Data Entry: AZDO was designed to facilitate quick data entry to capture work items quickly, while still enabling detailed capture of acceptance criteria and item properties.
Excel Integration: AZDO stands out for its integration with MS Excel, which enables quick updates for bulk items.
I did mention it has good visibility in terms of linking, but sometimes items do get lost, so if there was a better way to manage that, that would be great.
The wiki is not the prettiest thing to look at, so it could have refinements there.
I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.
Azure DevOps is a powerful, complex cloud application. As such there are a number of things it does great and something where there is room for improvement. One of those areas would be in usability. In my opinion it relies too much on search. There is no easy way to view all projects or to group them in a logical way. You need to search for everything.
When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.
Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.
Modern Requirements4DevOps is an AddIn for Azure DevOps Server (Microsoft Azure DevOps) and extends the native features of Azure DevOps in the area of Requirements Engineering, Requirements Management and Reporting. Azure DevOps already contains tons of valuable features. However, for bigger and more complex projects Modern Requirements4DevOps extends Azure DevOps by further features. Thus we used both products alongside.
We have saved a ton of time not calculating metrics by hand.
We no longer spend time writing out cards during planning, it goes straight to the board.
We no longer track separate documents to track overall department goals. We were able to create customized icons at the department level that lets us track each team's progress against our dept goals.
Better communication --> thus less misunderstandings
More Transparency about requirements --> adds context and helps to build a common understanding
Traceability of Requirements --> we used the baseline also to look into the history of requirements to understand how certain requirements have changed
