Azure DevOps Roadmap update for 2020 Q4

Sidi Merzouk

As part of our quarterly update, we’d like to share with you some of the highlights from the previous quarter and discuss what we have planned for this upcoming one. Each of the highlighted features includes a link to our public roadmap project where you’ll find more details on the item and where you can check its status.

Azure Boards

Customers have long desired the ability to view work items in a roadmap/timeline display. The Delivery Plans extension was a good start, but it is missing some key pieces of functionality. In Q4 of 2020, we are updating Delivery Plans, so it is part of the core product and building out some of those necessary features. These include:

  1. Allow work items to visually span sprint boundaries
  2. Support work items that are not assigned to an iteration path (start date and target date)
  3. Access to view existing plans for stakeholders
  4. Track dependencies across work items
  5. Roll up information to show the progress of child and grandchild work items

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Azure Pipelines

YAML pipeline runs today can be paused only when performing checks on critical resources like environments, service connections, etc. There is no way to pause a run independent of these resources. We will soon be rolling out the capability to pause a pipeline run at a chosen point and seek manual inputs or validations from your peers. The pipeline run can be resumed or rejected by peers with additional comments.

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Azure Artifacts

The Azure Artifacts team is moving to a new architecture for propagating updates from upstream sources, in response to customer feedback. Previously, upstream sources were polled only once every three hours. This injected latency and script complexity into build activities for customers.

With this upcoming feature, we are switching to a publication-subscription model, removing the need to poll upstream sources for changes. By the end of Q4, customers of Azure DevOps Services can expect the latency to drop significantly: a matter of seconds in the best case, up to a minute in the worst case.

This will be a behind-the-scenes improvement. When this feature is released it will be automatically applied to your organization for your private upstreams. We plan to make this improvement available for your public upstreams as well, it’s on the roadmap!

General

Billing setup and management events (set up billing, change billing subscription, remove billing, update quantity) will be available in the organization audit log.

Sign-in, personal access token (PAT) management (create, revoke, expire), PAT usage, SSH management (create public key, delete key), and SSH usage events will be added to the audit log. Though originally planned to be delivered in CY20 Q3, it is taking more effort than we anticipated and is now moving to CY Q4.

Azure DevOps REST API support to automate personal access token (PAT) management. This includes the ability to create new personal access tokens, rotate (regenerate), renew and revoke existing ones. Originally planned for CY Q3, this effort has been pushed to Q4.

Normally, changes to group memberships and permissions can take up to one hour to reflect in Azure DevOps. This tool will re-evaluate your group memberships and permissions on-demand; any recent changes will take effect immediately.

Today, any member of an Azure DevOps organization is able to view information such as the list of users, list of projects, billing details, usage data, and more by navigating to the organization settings. Many customers have wanted to restrict this information from some users like Stakeholders, AAD guest users, or members of a particular team. This quarter, administrators will be able to identify and restrict the organization settings from users and groups in their organization.

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:

  • Review the existing suggestions on the Developer Community, and upvote for one that represents your thoughts
  • Create a new suggestion if there are no existing ones that suit
  • Reach out to us on Twitter