Top Stories from the Microsoft DevOps Community – 2019.10.11

Sasha Rosenbaum

October 11th, 20190 0

Delivering software, especially in a large organization, is as much about writing code as about successful project and process management. In this week’s community update, we take a look at various ways to visualize and extend the process management tasks in Azure DevOps.

Tracking Progress with Rollup Columns in Azure DevOps
One of the most important tasks for project managers is tracking the progress of the project. This can get a little complicated when managing large projects with cross-functional teams. This great post and video by Donald Shulz from Imaginet features the recently released Rollup feature. Using Rollup in Azure Boards we can now visually track the progress on the parent work items all the way up to the Epic level. Thank you, Donald!

How to visually highlight blocked work items on an Azure DevOps sprint board
Speaking of visual representation, I’ve always enjoyed the ease with which you can create tags and color codes to represent different types of Work Items in Azure Boards. This post from Keith Babinec shows us how to set up a color code for blocked Work Items, so that you can see them at a glance when looking at your board. Thank you, Keith!

Connecting Azure DevOps with Excel for Project Data Analysis
While the reporting features in Azure DevOps and PowerBI can provide a lot of insights into how your team is doing, there is nothing like the old Excel spreadsheet to analyze your data. This post from Alain shows us how to connect an Azure DevOps organization to Excel, so that you can pull and analyze your Work Items. Stay tuned for Alain’s future post on how to sync the Excel spreadsheet back to Azure Boards!

Building an OutSystems pipeline with Azure DevOps
Continuous Delivery is a must for any successful company today, whether you are building applications from scratch or relying on software tools to create them. This article by Paulo Ribeiro walks us through creating a CI/CD pipeline for OutSystems, a low-code platform for developing enterprise-level web and mobile applications, using Azure DevOps. Thank you, Paulo!

Terraforming Azure DevOps
It is always interesting to see how automation tools can extend and complement each other, and how the community effort continues to drive innovation. We’ve featured multiple articles on how Terraform can be triggered in Azure Pipelines to automate infrastructure deployments. Here, we look at this integration from the opposite perspective. Moim Hossain created a Terraform provider to automate provisioning Azure DevOps projects, teams and members. The provider allows you to automate these routine tasks, which can save a lot of time and effort in a large organization! Thank you, Moim!

Azure DevOps Linkinator
And one more fun community extension. This open-source project by Daniel Cazzulino is an Azure Functions-powered browser extension that allows you to create shorter URLs for your Azure DevOps components. Thank you, Daniel!

If you’ve written an article about Azure DevOps or find some great content about DevOps on Azure, please share it with the #AzureDevOps hashtag on Twitter!