Intro to DevOps using Azure DevOps

Editor's Notes

• #3 What is DevOps: DevOps combines development (Dev) and operations (Ops) to unite people, process, and technology in application planning, development, delivery, and operations. DevOps enables coordination and collaboration between formerly siloed roles like development, IT operations, quality engineering, and security. Teams adopt DevOps culture, practices, and tools to increase confidence in the applications they build, respond better to customer needs, and achieve business goals faster. DevOps helps teams continually provide value to customers by producing better, more reliable products. DevOps and the Application Lifecycle: DevOps influences the application lifecycle throughout its planning, development, delivery, and operations phases. Each phase relies on the other phases, and the phases aren't role-specific. A DevOps culture involves all roles in each phase to some extent. The following diagram illustrates the phases of the DevOps application lifestyle: Agile project management is a key component of building a modern DevOps culture at your organization. If you are new to Agile or just want a refresher, we recommend you review the following topics: What is Agile? What is Scrum What is Kanban What is Agile Development?
• #4 Accelerate time to market Through increased efficiencies, improved team collaboration, automation tools, and continuous deployment--teams are able to rapidly reduce the time from product inception to market launch. Adapt to the market and competition A DevOps culture demands teams have a customer-first focus. By marrying agility, team collaboration, and focus on the customer experience, teams can continuously deliver value to their customers and increase their competitiveness in the marketplace. Maintain system stability and reliability By adopting continuous improvement practices, teams are able to build in increased stability and reliability of the products and services they deploy. These practices help reduce failures and risk. Improve the mean time to recovery The mean time to recovery metric indicates how long it takes to to recover from a failure or breach. To manage software failures, security breaches, and continuous improvement plans, teams should measure and work to improve this metric.
• #5 To fully implement DevOps, you must adopt a DevOps culture. Cultivating a DevOps culture requires deep changes in the way people work and collaborate. When organizations commit to a DevOps culture, they create an environment for high-performing teams to evolve. While adopting DevOps practices automates and optimizes processes through technology, without a shift to a DevOps culture within the organization and its people, you won't gain the full benefits of DevOps. The following practices are key components of a DevOps culture: Collaboration, visibility, and alignment: A hallmark of a healthy DevOps culture is collaboration between teams. Collaboration starts with visibility. Development, IT, and other teams should share their DevOps processes, priorities, and concerns with each other. By planning their work together, they are better positioned to align on goals and measures of success as they relate to the business. Shifts in scope and accountability: As teams align, they take ownership and become involved in other lifecycle phases—not just the ones central to their roles. For example, developers become accountable not only to the innovation and quality established in the develop phase, but also to the performance and stability their changes bring in the operate phase. At the same time, IT operators are sure to include governance, security, and compliance in the plan and develop phase. Shorter release cycles: DevOps teams remain agile by releasing software in short cycles. Shorter release cycles make planning and risk management easier since progress is incremental, which also reduces the impact on system stability. Shortening the release cycle also allows organizations to adapt and react to evolving customer needs and competitive pressure. Continuous learning: High-performing DevOps teams establish a growth mindset. They fail fast and incorporate learnings into their processes. They strive to continually improve, increase customer satisfaction, and accelerate innovation and market adaptability. What DevOps is not When considering what DevOps is, it's also important to make sure we learn what it's not. DevOps is not: A methodology A specific piece of software A quick fix for an organization's challenges Just a team or a job title (although these titles are reasonably common in the industry)
• #6 Azure DevOps supports a collaborative culture and set of processes that bring together developers, project managers, and contributors to develop software. It allows organizations to create and improve products at a faster pace than they can with traditional software development approaches. Azure DevOps provides integrated features that you can access through your web browser or IDE client. You can use all the services included with Azure DevOps, or choose just what you need to complement your existing workflows. Azure Boards:Deliver value to your users faster using proven agile tools to plan, track, and discuss work across your team. Delivers a suite of Agile tools to support planning and tracking work, code defects, and issues using Kanban and Scrum methods. Azure Pipelines: Build, test, and deploy with CI/CD that works with any language, platform, and cloud. Connect to GitHub or any other Git provider and deploy continuously. Provides build and release services to support continuous integration and delivery of your applications. Azure Repos: Get unlimited, cloud-hosted private Git repos and collaborate to build better code with pull requests and advanced file management Provides Git repositories or Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) for source control of your code. Azure Test Plans: Test and ship with confidence using manual and exploratory testing tools Provides several tools to test your apps, including manual/exploratory testing and continuous testing. Azure Artifacts: Create, host, and share packages with your team, and add artifacts to your CI/CD pipelines with a single click Allows teams to share packages such as Maven, npm, NuGet, and more from public and private sources and integrate package sharing into your pipelines.
• #8 Azure Boards is a standalone service within the Azure DevOps suite that helps teams plan, track, and discuss work across the entire software development process. It provides a flexible, customizable platform for managing work items, such as user stories, bugs, tasks, and issues, so you can track your work item's progress throughout the development lifecycle. Azure Boards supports agile methodologies, including Scrum and Kanban. It provides a range of features and integrations to help teams collaborate and stay organized with dashboards, reports, and notifications. With Azure Boards, you gain the advantage of full integration with the Azure DevOps platform. Azure DevOps is designed to provide end-to-end traceability, tracking work from requirements to deployment. You gain insight at each step of decisions made and software deployed. Some of the traceability tasks supported include: Create a branch from a requirement Create a pull request of updated branch Validate the pull request using a build pipeline Create and run inline tests on requirements Merge the pull request into the main, default branch Deploy changes into production with deployment status to Azure Boards Monitor and report on requirements traceability Combine Kanban boards and drag-and-drop sprint planning with comprehensive
traceability and reporting for the perfect home for all your ideas–big and small. With the Azure Boards, teams can manage their software projects. It provides a rich set of capabilities including native support for Scrum and Kanban, customizable dashboards, and integrated reporting. These tools scale as your business grows. Quickly and easily track user stories, backlog items, task, features, and bugs associated with your project. Track work by adding work items based on the process and work item types available to your project.
• #9 Start simply, scale as you grow: Azure Boards offers predefined work item types for tracking features, user stories, bugs, and tasks, making it easy to start using your product backlog or Kanban board. It supports different Agile methods, so you can implement the method that suits you best. Additionally, you can add teams as your organization grows to give them the autonomy to track their work as they see fit. Use visual, interactive tools: Visual tools help teams quickly see and share progress with Kanban boards, product backlogs, built-in scrum boards and planning tools, and delivery plans. Customize easily: Easily configure and customize Kanban boards, taskboards, and delivery plans through the user interface, as well as add custom fields, work item types, and portfolio backlogs. Use built-in social tools and communication: Work item forms provide built-in discussion that you can use to capture questions, notes, and communication as they occur. With this feature, you can maintain a history of what a team decides on any particular work item. You can quickly bring a team member or an entire team into the conversation by using @mentions. Capture information, generous cloud storage: Work items are designed to track all the information you need to track. You can edit in rich text, drag and drop inline images, and add larger attachments. You can add attachments up to 60 MB and as many as 100 attachments. Also, you can link work items within a hierarchy or by simple related links. Each work item form maintains a history of changes, so you can review what changed, who made the change, and when. Find what you need quickly and get notified of changes: Azure Boards provides easy-to-use tools to help you quickly find specific work items as your project grows. You can follow work items to monitor updates and changes, use pivot views to show work items assigned to you, use the query engine to filter work items based on any field, and use ad-hoc search with quick inline filters. You can also personalize your alerts for work items that are assigned to you or have been changed. Monitor status and progress with built-in dashboards and analytics: With Azure Boards, you gain access to many tools to generate reports to support tracking status and trends. By using configurable dashboards, you can add one or more widgets. You configure widgets to display the information and data you want, such as the following bug burndown widget. Along with dashboards, you have access to the Analytics service. This service is optimized for fast read-access and server-based aggregations. By using Analytics views and Power BI, you can create highly sophisticated reports on the project data of interest. Integrate with Office: Project managers who want to use familiar tools can import and export work item queries to and from Microsoft Office Excel or import and export work items using .csv files. For more information, see Bulk import or update work items using CSV files or Bulk add or modify work items with Excel Extend functionality: You can gain even greater functionality by adding Marketplace extensions, many of which are free. An extension is an installable unit that adds capabilities to Visual Studio, Azure DevOps Services, or Visual Studio Code. You can find extensions within these products or in the Visual Studio Marketplace, Azure DevOps tab. Also, by using the REST API, you can create your own extensions or tools to integrate with Azure DevOps Services. Get updates via a mobile browser: It's easy to stay on top of changes as they occur, using the mobile browser, you can be notified and respond to changes made to work items. Start for free: You can start for free and add up to five free users and unlimited stakeholders.
• #10 Azure Repos is a set of version control tools that you can use to manage your code. Whether your software project is large or small, using version control as soon as possible is a good idea. Version control systems are software that help you track changes you make in your code over time. As you edit your code, you tell the version control system to take a snapshot of your files. The version control system saves that snapshot permanently so you can recall it later if you need it. Use version control to save your work and coordinate code changes across your team. Even if you're just a single developer, version control helps you stay organized as you fix bugs and develop new features. Version control keeps a history of your development so that you can review and even roll back to any version of your code with ease. Azure Repos provides two types of version control: Git: distributed version control Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC): centralized version control Git Git is the most commonly used version control system today and is quickly becoming the standard for version control. Git is a distributed version control system, meaning that your local copy of code is a complete version control repository. These fully functional local repositories make it is easy to work offline or remotely. You commit your work locally, and then sync your copy of the repository with the copy on the server. Git in Azure Repos is standard Git. You can use the clients and tools of your choice, such as Git for Windows, Mac, partners' Git services, and tools such as Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Connect your favorite development environment Review code with pull requests Protect branches with policies Extend pull request workflows with pull request status Isolate code with forks Connect your favorite development environment Connect your favorite development environment to Azure Repos to access your repos and manage your work. Share your code using: Command-line Visual Studio Code Visual Studio Xcode Eclipse IntelliJ Collaborate on code changes with threaded discussion and continuous integration for each change. Use forks to promote collaboration with Inner Source workflows.
• #11 Azure Pipelines is the perfect launchpad for your code – automating your builds and deployments so you spend less time with the nuts and bolts and more time being creative Azure Pipelines automatically builds and tests code projects. It supports all major languages and project types and combines continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous testing to build, test, and deliver your code to any destination. Continuous Integration Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice used by development teams of automating, merging, and testing code. CI helps to catch bugs early in the development cycle, which makes them less expensive to fix. Automated tests execute as part of the CI process to ensure quality. CI systems produce artifacts and feed them to release processes to drive frequent deployments. Continuous Delivery Continuous Delivery (CD) is a process by which code is built, tested, and deployed to one or more test and production environments. Deploying and testing in multiple environments increases quality. CD systems produce deployable artifacts, including infrastructure and apps. Automated release processes consume these artifacts to release new versions and fixes to existing systems. Systems that monitor and send alerts run continually to drive visibility into the entire CD process. Continuous Testing Whether your app is on-premises or in the cloud, you can automate build-deploy-test workflows and choose the technologies and frameworks. Then, you can test your changes continuously in a fast, scalable, and efficient manner. Continuous testing offers the following benefits. Maintain quality and find problems as you develop. Continuous testing with Azure DevOps Server ensures your app still works after every check-in and build, enabling you to find problems earlier by running tests automatically with each build. Use any test type and any test framework. Choose your preferred test technologies and frameworks. View rich analytics and reporting. When your build is done, review your test results to resolve any issues. Actionable build-on-build reports let you instantly see if your builds are getting healthier. But it's not just about speed - detailed and customizable test results measure the quality of your app. Why Should I use Azure Pipelines? Azure Pipelines provides a quick, easy, and safe way to automate building your projects with consistent and quality code that's readily available to users. Use Azure Pipelines to support the following scenarios: Works with any language or platform Deploys to different types of targets at the same time Integrates with Azure deployments Builds on Windows, Linux, or Mac machines Integrates with GitHub Works with open-source projects Implementing CI and CD pipelines helps to ensure consistent and quality code that's readily available to users. And, Azure Pipelines provides a quick, easy, and safe way to automate building your projects and making them available to users. Use Azure Pipelines because it supports the following scenarios: Works with any language or platform Deploys to different types of targets at the same time Integrates with Azure deployments Builds on Windows, Linux, or Mac machines Integrates with GitHub Works with open-source projects.
• #12 Managing software packages can be a complex and time-consuming process, particularly when working with large-scale projects. Fortunately, Azure Artifacts provides a robust platform for package management that can help streamline the process and improve collaboration among development teams.  Azure Artifacts enables developers to share and consume packages from different feeds and public registries. Packages can be shared within the same team, the same organization, and even publicly. Azure Artifacts supports multiple package types such as NuGet, Npm, Python, Maven, and Universal Packages.
• #13 Azure Test Plans provides rich and powerful tools everyone in the team can use to drive quality and collaboration throughout the development process. The easy-to-use, browser-based test management solution provides all the capabilities required for planned manual testing, user acceptance testing, exploratory testing, and gathering feedback from stakeholders. Collaborate on code changes with threaded discussion and continuous integration for each change. Use forks to promote collaboration with Inner Source workflows. Quality is a vital aspect of software systems, and manual testing and exploratory testing continue to be important techniques for maximizing this. In today's software development processes, everybody in the team owns quality - including developers, managers, product owners, user experience advocates, and more. Key Benefits Test on any platform. With the Test Plans web portal, you can use your browser to access all the manual testing capabilities. It enables you to create and run manual tests through an easy-to-use, web-based interface that can be accessed from all major browsers on any platform. Rich Diagnostic data collection. Using the web-based Test Runner and Test Runner client you can collect rich diagnostic data during your tests. This includes screenshots, an image action log, screen recordings, code coverage, IntelliTrace traces, and test impact data for your apps under test. This data is automatically included in all the bugs you create during test, making it easy for developers to reproduce the issues. End to End Traceability. Azure DevOps and TFS provide end-to-end traceability of your requirements, builds, tests and bugs. Users can track their requirement quality from cards on the Kanban board. Bugs created while testing are automatically linked to the requirements and builds being tested, which helps you track the quality of the requirements or builds. Extensible platform. You can combine the tools and technologies you already know with the development tools that work best for you to integrate with and extend Azure DevOps. Use the REST APIs and contribution model available for the Test platform to create extensions that provide the experience you need for your test management lifecycle.