Azure DevOps Roadmap update for 2020 Q3

Sidi Merzouk

July 20th, 202015 0

As part of our ongoing commitment to Azure DevOps, we’d like to share with you some key features we’re planning on delivering over the next quarter. Each of these highlighted features includes links to our public roadmap project where you’ll find more details on the item and where you can check its status.

General

Azure Boards

  • Delivery Plans 2.0

    In Q3, we are increasing our investments in Boards to provide a first class roadmap/timeline feature. Our work will focus on improving and enhancing the capabilities of Delivery Plans. Q3 will be the first wave of investments where the focus will be bringing Delivery Plans into the core product (instead of an extension). The second wave of features will be focused on new functionality and value that have been long time requests from our customers.

    Q3 enhancements include:

    • Bring Delivery Plans into the core Azure Boards product instead of having to install an extension
    • Allow work items to span iteration boundaries
    • Support a minimum of 25 team backlogs on a single delivery plan
    • Filter by Parent
    • Give stakeholders read-only access to delivery plans
       

    Late Q3 and early Q4 features include:

    • Display rollup information on the work item cards
    • Provide a condensed view for better viewing of large plans
    • Provide a dependency tracking experience across work items with predecessor and successor link types

Azure Pipelines

  • Elastic self-hosted agent pools

    In Q2, we rolled out a preview of scale-set agents – our first version of elastic agents based on VM scale sets. Since then, the adoption of this feature has been gradually increasing. Thank you to all of you that have provided feedback during the preview period. Based on the feedback, here is our plan for Q3:

    • We will add scheduling to the scale-up operation so that you do not have to run the same number of agents during peak hours and after peak hours
    • We will roll out elastic agents that run in containers on a Kubernetes cluster. Besides being able to use your infrastructure more efficiently, this will also improve the speed of scaling operations
    • Finally, we will improve the diagnosability of elastic agents by exposing background logs and possibly a few more knobs for you to control

Azure Test Plans

  • New Test Plans page

    The new persona-based Test Plans page will be introduced as the default experience with a revamped user interface that provides new views and toolsets for tasks such as authoring, tracking, and executing. The new page is clutter-free and integrates seamlessly with the rest of Azure DevOps. As an addition to the pre-existing page, the new page brings in the following new capabilities:

    • Copy Test Plans: This feature allows the user to copy/clone a Test Plan within a project
    • Import test suites: You can now reuse the suites which are created already and import them into the current test suite/test plan using Import Test cases
    • Copy/clone test cases: You can now copy or clone a test case across test suites, test plans, or projects
    • View linked items: For each test case, you can view the linked bugs, test suites, or requirements
    • Import/Export test plans from/to CSV files: With the help of this feature you can export the existing test cases to Excel CSV file, make changes to the CSV file and then import the file back into the suite. There are many other use cases of this functionality. New test plans page – Azure Test Plans

Azure Artifacts

  • Upstream Sources with Universal Packages

    We have been previewing Upstream sources with Universal Packages feature for some time now, and we are glad to announce that we will be making it generally available by the end of September. Upstreams within Azure Artifacts enable you to manage all of your product’s dependencies within a single feed. In that one feed, you can store the packages you’ve produced and consumed from either remote feeds, or other authenticated feeds. This feature provides simplicity, determinism, provenance, and peace-of-mind to Azure Artifacts customers.

    Now, we’ve added the ability for customers to use Universal Packages (Upacks) as an upstream source. Up until now, customers were only able to use npm, NuGet, Python, and Maven package types as upstream sources.

    This feature is available for use with feeds within the same Azure DevOps organization. We have work upcoming to add this functionality for use with feeds in other organizations associated with your Azure Active Directory at a future date. Let us know if this is something you want for your group here!

We always appreciate your feedback, because it helps us prioritize what we should work on. If you have a new idea, change you’d like to see, or a suggestion on what you’d like to see next, here are some options:

Sidi Merzouk Product Manager, Azure DevOps/GitHub

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15 comments

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  • Nick Jeffries 0

    Extremely excited about upcoming enhancements to Delivery Plans. However, the Delivery Plans 2.0 link you have provided above points to the wrong roadmap item. Can you provide the correct link so I can check it out? Thanks so much!

    • Sidi MerzoukMicrosoft employee 0

      Thanks, Nick! I went ahead and updated the link.

    • Matt CooperMicrosoft employee 0

      Glad you asked! We’ve just published guidance on renaming existing repos, and this sprint will introduce a feature to specify your own default. Later this summer (along with our peers at the major Git hosting companies) we will switch our default away from master to something more inclusive, likely main. I’ll also go address that feedback item!

  • Andre Wanlin 0

    What is the timeline for the features to show up in Azure DevOps Server 2020 or as part of an Update 1? We find ourselves increasingly using PATs and it would be wonderful to have some automation in that area which you look to be adding. The other items would be great to have as well!

  • Josh Johanning 0

    “https://dev.azure.com/mseng/AzureDevOpsRoadmap/_queries/edit/1710668” 403 error for the PAT management. Can you check on that?

    • Sidi MerzoukMicrosoft employee 0

      I’ve checked the link in an incognito window and was able to access it.

      • Josh Johanning 0

        I was prompted for credentials on that link in incognito. I think it should be “https://dev.azure.com/mseng/AzureDevOpsRoadmap/_workitems/edit/1710668” instead of “https://dev.azure.com/mseng/AzureDevOpsRoadmap/_queries/edit/1710668”

        I can access that URL now. The same with the New Test Plans page and Universal Artifacts link also.

  • Amittai Shapira 0

    Really liked the PAT news – will solve so many issues!
    We’re not using Delivery Plans as of yet and want to look into it – should we wait for the feature to be integrated into Azure DevOps, or install the extension now? Should we expect it to be available in the coming couple of sprints?

    • Dan HellemMicrosoft employee 0

      You can install the extension now and your plan data should be preserved. We expect a preview will be available sometime in early to mid September.

  • Marco Borm 0

    You should fix some bug first:
    * Jira integration Plugin by Microsoft is completely broken for 10 weeks now. No acceptable activity by Microsoft there, even workarounds provided by the community are provided to customers after 20 days.
    * Integrating Azure Artifacts as PowerShell Repository is a pain, because each component (Azure Credential Provider, PowerShellGet ) of that has blocking issues. PAT authentication is not working at all, DeviceFlow only working with workarounds. Again these workarounds are provided by the community, MS developer activity at the PowerShellGet project nearly zero for long time.

    Each of these very relevant (opinion) components also has zero activity by the MS management/product owner, whoever you name it.

  • Gabor Bernics 0

    “We will roll out elastic agents that run in containers on a Kubernetes cluster. Besides being able to use your infrastructure more efficiently, this will also improve the speed of scaling operations”

    Greetings!

    That’s music to my ears.
    Are you also working on Windows Containers-based solution for this purpose?
    If yes, do you know any limitation about the usable tools stack (Visual Studio especially)?

  • Simon KhozamMicrosoft employee 0

    Great progress there in Azure DevOps….
    Wanted to ask :
    1) Is there is any plan to manage a portfolio board on ADO, to show timeline for multiple programs and selct major milestones on portfolio level.
    There are ew add-ins there but not up to the level of managing portfolio.

    2) and if we can build a project template with dependencies and inherit it for each of new projects ?
    this will be useful for NPI programs that are very well established in terms of what needs to be done and cross dependency but adding dependency manually for every program is so time-consuming.

    Thanks,
    Simon

    • Dan HellemMicrosoft employee 0

      Hey Simon,

      1) We are working on the Delivery Plans 2.0 that will give you a big chunk of what you are asking for

      2) Right now our focus is just visualizing the dependencies. As we get further down the road we would love to hear more about this scenario

  • Pratik Patel 0

    Thanks for giving this information to us. This is very helpful for me.
    Know about article writing

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