Customer feedback is critical to helping us improve Azure DevOps. Over the years we’ve addressed thousands of issues and suggestions originating from our users through many different channels. In order for us to collaborate with you more effectively, we’ve been improving our feedback channels along the way so that they provide us more real time information and the feedback lands directly in our systems.

Up until two years ago, our feedback systems left a lot of room for improvement – customers could use the “send a smile” feature, but this would result in only coarse-grained feedback such as “I like this” or “I don’t like this.” The feedback we got through this UI then went into a database our team accessed, but didn’t leave an easy way for customers to see the feedback that other customers were giving so they could say, “I have that problem too!” More than that, the back-end system that gathered feedback was separate from the engineering systems we use for tracking bugs and features, crash reports, hang reports, and telemetry. Without a unified system on the backend, identifying the most impactful issues was a time consuming and error-prone job.

In 2017, we introduced Developer Community, a new system for reporting issues which allowed them to be tracked in publicly via https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com. These issues were then integrated directly into our engineering system. Thus, a report entered via Developer Community became a bug in our Azure DevOps work item database, and votes from the community gave items additional weight.

Since introducing this system, we have received over 17,000 issues from our customers. This included over 3,000 bug reports that we’ve addressed and another 5,000 issues where customers were unblocked by using the solutions and workarounds contributed by Microsoft and the larger community of developers.

Until now, we’ve focused the system on issue tracking, but that’s left a gap in our understanding of what additional features customers want from us. Today, we’re announcing that the same system that we use for reporting issues will also work for feature requests, all in one convenient place. If you have an idea or a request for a feature, you can now use the new Suggest a Feature button on the Azure DevOps Developer Community and make your suggestions.  You can also browse suggestions from other developers and vote for your favorite features to help us understand the impact to the community (https://aka.ms/AzureDevOpsSuggestions).

As part of this work, we are transitioning away from UserVoice as the primary means for our customers to request features. We’re moving away from UserVoice for the same reason we moved away from the old “send a smile” and “Connect” systems: we want customer feature requests to be directly integrated into our core engineering system so we have complete line of sight into the feedback customers are giving us.  We’ll migrate many existing UserVoice items from UserVoice, including those that have garnered at least one supporter for each month they’ve been active.  This means that suggestions with relatively low vote counts and those which are fairly old with only limited support will not be moved over.  Please see these frequently asked questions for more details on how UserVoice votes and comments are being handled.  I recognize that may cause some frustration and I apologize in advance.  If you think we’ve overlooked an important suggestion in the migration, please sign into Developer Community and submit the item again.

Suggest a Feature on Developer Community is aimed at providing a single convenient place for all your Azure DevOps feedback, to improve your engagement with our team and to have a greater impact on our product. We are looking forward to hearing your suggestions. Thank you for the valuable feedback you provide and your participation in our Developer Community!

Thank you!