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)
OpenText ALM Octane
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
OpenText™ ALM Octane, formerly from Micro Focus, includes integrated planning, continuous integration, test management, and release management. With these capabilities, it helps Agile teams and DevOps toolchains to deliver high-quality software with insight, traceability, analytics-focused end-to-end visibility, and continuous quality.
N/A
Pricing
Azure DevOps Services
OpenText ALM Octane
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)
ADO is well suited for the visibility of day-to-day tasks and responsibilities as well as things such as Features, user stories, etc. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any scenario where it might not be well suited, as you can customize ADO to your liking to a degree.
For big applications and projects where different teams work in a different location, it is very helpful for them to keep all the processes in one place and makes it easy to keep track of all team member's processes.
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.
Need to make the changes so that it doesn't occupy most of the CPU utilization and memory
Execution of Bulky SQl Queries leads to either the SQl being out of exception or the VS being unresponsive
Integration with Microsoft products is easy, but with non-Microsoft products it is more difficult, and you have to make a lot of configuration changes to integrate
With every upgrade of the Visual Studio, like from VS 2010 to VS 2013 , we need to upgrade our hardware/machine, as the VS hardware requirement also increases
If code is getting compiled in one visual studio, like in VS 2010, that the same code could possibly give an error when compiled in VS 2013, due to certain changes in keyword, data format, etc., with the VS upgrade
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.
Jira is fantastic for project management and customer facing portal. It is not good for pure development (no integration with Git, pipeline management, automated testing features). If DevOps were to integrate and adopt the project features of Jira as well as the customer facing interfaces, I feel it would be a complete project management system.
Micro Focus ALM Octane use at DaVita goes back beyond my starting with them three years ago. They have used it as part of DevOps as well as for performance measurement of software releases in combo with HP Performance Center (a great combination). Jira is well suited to managing bug reports and development processes with Agile and Scrum, but ALM Octane goes above and beyond that.
Our Performance Measurement team uses ALM all the time for test performance measurement in conjunction with HP Performance Center. We could not have such a robust performance capability without ALM.
Not being on the management side of it (I am a technical resource for support), I do not have solid information on ROI.
