Azure DevOps Roadmap update for 2019 Q2

Gloridel Morales

Last week we published an update to the Features Timeline. The features listed below link to the public roadmap project where you can find more details about each item. Here are a few highlights on some of the features for Q2.

Azure Boards:

  • Instant search for work items

    You’ll be able to access your recently visited work items from the search box instead of having to navigate to the search results page. This will reduce the time it will take you to find your work items.

  • Display rollup on backlog

    In backlogs, you will have the option to add a new column to display rollup based on child work items. For example, an epic backlog can have a column to display the sum of story points of linked user stories.

Azure Repos:

  • Virtual Filesystem (VFS) for Git – Public Preview for macOS

    VFS for Git is an open source system that enables Git to operate at enterprise-scales. In Q2, we plan to add VFS for macOS to help you address the challenges of working with large repos.

  • Branch policies administration improvements – Public Preview

    Branch policies are powerful features of Azure Repos that help teams protect their branches. In Q2 we plan to ship improvements to the branch policies administration experience to make it easier for users to set policies for multiple branches and repos without having to navigate away from the branch policies administration page. We will also enable the capability to set a policy for all repositories in the same project.

Azure Pipelines:

  • Multistage pipelines

    We will expand the current single-stage YAML pipelines to support multiple stages with approvals. With this, you will be able to author the entire pipeline from build to release in code using YAML.

  • YAML templates for CI/CD

    We currently have a getting started experience for YAML-based pipelines. This experience analyzes the content of your repository and suggests one or more CI templates. It then generates the YAML code that you can commit to your repository. In Q2, we will enhance the experience to take the inputs needed to generate the multi-stage YAML pipeline.

  • Approval in YAML pipelines

    Instead of automatically moving a run from one stage to the next, you might want an approver to review it first. While approvals is a concept that already exists in release management, it does not yet exist in YAML pipelines. Config-as-code poses interesting challenges for where you specify approvals. We plan to make approvals a policy on the resource (agent pool, variable group, service connection, or secure file), and any stage that uses that resource will be paused for an approval.

  • Rerun failed stages in a multistage build

    When a stage fails in a multistage build, you will be able to rerun the failed stage without having to start from the beginning. You will also have the option of taking an older run that passed the failed stage and re-apply that stage.

  • Faster and flexible artifacts

    We’re replacing the build artifacts you use today with Pipeline Artifacts. This will provide a fast and integrated system for managing your pipelines. Some key features include:

    • Pipeline Artifacts come with new YAML syntax that makes it easy and quick to publish
    • Pipeline Artifacts only upload content that’s not already present somewhere in your organization, resulting in substantial performance improvements, especially for large artifacts
  • Enhanced pipeline failure and duration report

    You will be able to view a pipeline duration along with drill downs into the duration for jobs and their agent wait time. In addition, you will see the stage in a pipeline that is causing most failures along with insight about the tasks that are contributing to the maximum failures in the pipeline.

  • Hosted pools and visibility into concurrency usage

    Currently, you see multiple hosted pools and agent slots for each of the agent pools in your organization. We are updating the hosted pools experience to have a single agent pool. This will allow you to browse all the jobs running in that pool in a single place.

Azure Artifacts:

  • Public (unauthenticated) feeds

    Public feeds allow you to share your packages with anonymous users. If you’re creating pre-release or nightly packages as part of a CI/CD flow before publishing to the official package sources (nuget.org, etc.), you will be able to use public feeds to share them with all your collaborators.

  • Developer Community suggestions

    In Q2 we plan to deliver at least two of the most voted suggestions from the Developer Community. Changes will include expanded NuGet metadata and promote task in Pipelines.

  • Search across package feeds

    Search across package feeds will allow you to find any package in Azure Artifacts from a single query, rather than needing to filter each feed.

  • Universal Packages feature updates

    We’ll continue to invest in the Universal Packages platform, adding features that will include the following:

    • Showing the size of Universal Packages
    • APIs to download a Universal Package as an archive
    • Ability to get latest version of a package from CLI, using wildcards
    • Ability to partially download a Universal Package in the CLI

Administration:

  • Connect to Azure Active Directory (AAD), set up billing, and updated security and org settings

    We will continue to make it easier to administer Azure DevOps by adding improved experiences for connecting to AAD and setting up or modifying billing within Azure DevOps administration. We’re also addressing two of the top voted Developer Community posts by rolling out an improved security and organization settings and giving you the ability to change a project profile image from the Project Overview settings page.

  • Auditing in Azure DevOps

    The audit experience will provide a centralized location to review audit events raised in Azure DevOps. Audit logs will include actions that occur throughout an Azure DevOps organization. Some examples of actions are permission changes, resource deletion, code download, access, and much more. Initially, auditing will include events for security changes, project updates (rename, delete, and create), and auditing for the audit experience itself.

  • Pay for users once across organizations under the same Azure subscription

    Azure DevOps will move to a new model for per user billing. The new model ensures that you only pay once per user across organizations. This will simplify management, especially for large organizations.

Marketplace:

  • Publisher Certification

    We plan to ship a top publisher program designed to help you acquire extensions with confidence.  A top publisher icon will be displayed for a publisher once it meets our policies, adoption and support benchmarks.

We appreciate your feedback, which helps us prioritize. If you have new ideas or changes you’d like to see, provide a suggestion on the Developer Community or vote for an existing one.

6 comments

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  • Hendrik 0

    Hello, what about the on-premises release?Will we get more frequent updates to be aligned with the hosted version?Due to comany policy we have to be on-prem but the lack of features compared to the hosted version is a real bummer :/We are specially looking for the Universal Packages feature which does not exist (yet).

    • Gloridel MoralesMicrosoft employee 0

      Hi Hendrik. We don’t plan to release on-prem more frequently, we will continue with the six months cadence. As far as Universal Packages, we don’t have it in the roadmap for on-prem. 

  • Alexandre Nedelec 0

    Is running yaml pipelines locally is still on the roadmap ? I can’t see it but it is something important that lacks in YAML pipelines compared to other solutions like Cake, Fake …

    • Gloridel MoralesMicrosoft employee 0

      Hi Alexandre, this is not yet in the roadmap. 

  • Everton Macedo 0

    What is this “Blog Thing” about? if you don’t answer any question, then please disable commens

    • Gloridel MoralesMicrosoft employee 0

      Hi Everton, I apologize for the delayed response.  Let me know if you have any questions. 

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