Azure DevOps Roadmap update for 2020 Q1

Gloridel Morales

Azure DevOps Roadmap update for 2020 Q1

Last week we updated the Features Timeline to provide visibility to several of our key investments for this quarter. I am happy to share a few highlights on some of the features for Q1. Note that each feature links to our public roadmap project where you can find more details about each item and see its status.

Azure Boards:

  • More actionable error experience for Required fields

    We’ve heard your feedback about making the Required fields error experience more friendly. We will make the errors more visible, easily understood, and actionable to help you quickly fill in required information, both on your board card as well as within your work item form.

Azure Repos:

  • Upgraded pull request web experience

    We will convert the pull request details pages to a more modern, fast, and mobile-friendly UI. This will include the overview tab, files tab, commits tab, etc. In addition, we will add several features that will help you review pull requests faster and improve the overall pull request experience. Some of the features that we will add include:

    • Add required reviewers per pull request in addition to those added by policy.
    • A summary of policies that includes easier actions for failed policies.
    • Ability to compare multiple updates not just subsequent ones when reviewing files.
    • Suggest a change that the pull requestor can accept and commit without leaving the pull request.
    • Being able to wait on optional policies when setting auto-complete.

Azure Pipelines:

  • Runtime parameters and pipeline variables

    We will improve the YAML templating language and pipeline variables. YAML pipelines gain a way to specify runtime parameters. These are slots for the pipeline author to offer options to the end user running the pipeline while maintaining control over what the pipeline can do. Strings, numbers, enumerations, and even entire YAML objects can be entered at runtime rather than hardcoded into the YAML file. These same data types can be used with YAML templates, giving greater confidence about the resulting pipeline definition. Separate but related, variables can be marked “read only”, sealing them so that tasks cannot change their values between steps.

  • Multi-repository support for YAML pipelines

    Last quarter, we introduced the ability to check out multiple repositories in a single pipeline job. This quarter, we’ll improve this multi-repository support to allow a separation between the repository containing the YAML file and the repository containing the code. This will let you get all the benefits of config as code, while letting the pipeline definition live in a different repository with different access controls.

  • Automated checks between stages

    We’ve had great feedback on approvals in YAML pipelines since we released in November. This quarter we will enhance the functionality to support completing other automated validations before start of a stage. Like approvals, checks will be a protection on the infrastructure resources (environments, service connections and agent pools), ensuring all jobs that impact them meet a fixed set of criteria. We will invest in capabilities to allow invoking HTTP APIs for any service to perform the validation and periodic re-invocations for checks that take longer to complete.

Reporting:

  • Copy Dashboard

    You will be able to make a copy of a dashboard within a team to another team, or to another team project. This will help you save time when replicating your dashboards across teams.

Administration:

  • Streaming for Azure DevOps Auditing

    Azure DevOps Auditing is now in public preview! You can learn more about it here.

    In this quarter we’ll be working on a streaming feature which will let you send your logs to first- and third-party Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) tools. The use of these tools along with auditing will give you transparency into your workforce and allow for anomaly detection, trend visualization, and more.

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, vote for an existing one, or contact us on Twitter.