To remain competitive and cost-effective, enterprise businesses are needing to optimize business functions across the board—with no area more ripe for improvement than software development.
Think you’re not a software company? Think again. Thanks to digital transformation, every company is now a software company. Whether you’re in manufacturing, retail, service delivery, or technology, your ability to remain relevant and deliver products or services efficiently to your customers depends on your ability to develop and implement technology solutions that support your business goals.
But regardless of whether your organization is developing internal tools that shorten time to market or streamline operations, or making consumer-facing applications, the road to development is fraught with danger—poor planning can waylay even the best-intended development, and scope creep and cost overruns can end up delaying or completely scrapping solutions that could help enterprises deliver greater value to their customers. Software development has shifted dramatically in recent years, from once in six months to many deployments within an hour—a cadence which large organizations are hardly suited for.
Azure DevOps, a fully-integrated Azure service built around newly emerging DevOps principles, is helping enterprise businesses of all sizes and scale better manage their development, deployment, and continuous delivery pipelines. Due to the number of moving parts in an enterprise, DevOps coordination can be particularly challenging; geographically distributed teams, the volume and nature of ad-hoc requests, and disparate technologies being used can limit the speed at which DevOps teams are capable of functioning. Here are some of the ways Azure DevOps is helping enterprises address those challenges.
Making Geography Redundant
Having global teams collaborate on projects at a speed which makes them feasible can be a little like herding cats. Azure DevOps is designed to help geographically disparate teams function as a single cohesive unit.
First is in the organizational structure itself—Azure DevOps functions within three organizational concepts—at the top level, the ‘Organization,’ which serves as a container for an organization’s projects. Second, there is the ‘Project’ level, which allows organizations to manage all of the projects relevant to them. Finally, there is the ‘Teams’ level, which belongs to the project to help track activities or manage backlogs. Individuals can build custom dashboards and widgets that help them track the progress of the projects they’re working on.
This organizational structure can help break down geographic walls between business locations, as organizations, projects, and teams can be comprised of employees across any location, thanks to the power of Azure’s cloud infrastructure.
Curious about the Azure Data Factory and Azure Data Lakes? Read More Here.
The very premise of DevOps is to erode the silos that have traditionally existed between UX, IT, development, and QA teams by fostering greater communication and collaboration between these business units—by providing a platform for teams to collaborate on projects within the cloud. Azure DevOps facilitates this by providing a collaborative, accessible platform where the work takes place.
No Training Required
The ideal tech stack for a DevOps employee is using the tools and code base that they’re familiar with—an opportunity that Azure DevOps provides. Rather than limiting employees to restrictive native apps, Azure DevOps seamlessly integrates with several third-party repos (such as GitHub) continuous integration and delivery tools (such as Jenkins), and infrastructure management tools (such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and Terraform). Teams are also able to integrate Azure DevOps with thousands of other services via Microsoft Flow.
Azure DevOps also permits developers to code in their ‘native’ language, including Node.js, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, C/C++, .NET, Android, and iOS, and deploy to any platform, including Azure, Amazon Web Services, or the Google Cloud Platform, providing unparalleled flexibility, and driving greater productivity and faster deploy times.
Compounding the speed to deploy is the ability to automate large swaths of the testing process—writing automated test plans that will test your deploys across web and desktop, automatically record observations, and capture errors that are automatically linked to test scenarios in Azure Boards, ensuring teams have total visibility.
Get Agile
In large-scale enterprise business, project requests can come flying in fast and furious—requiring organizational visibility to ensure no feature request, project, or incremental improvement is left behind.
Azure DevOps supports both Agile and Scrum methodologies through its Boards feature, allowing projects to efficiently manage incoming requests, assign work items to individuals (or a backlog), and generate sprints, burndown charts, and custom dashboards to gain full visibility into work being completed, deployments being rolled out, and releases on the horizon at the organization, project, team, and individual level.
Azure DevOps is a suite of tools built from the ground up to help enterprise businesses achieve their development goals by providing them unparalleled flexibility, efficiency, and control over the end-to-end development process. See how Azure DevOps is supporting software development in some of the world’s most successful enterprises—speak to one of our product experts today.
