Top Stories from the Microsoft DevOps Community – 2020.01.17

Sasha Rosenbaum

January 17th, 20200 0

The new year is underway, and the days are getting longer. This week, we have some exciting news to share, and some great articles to discuss. Grab a warm beverage and let’s get started!

Tricentis Acquires SpecFlow to Support Agile Development at Scale
Let’s start with some good news! This week, it was announced that Tricentis, a software test automation company, has acquired SpecFlow, one of the biggest and most trusted tools for behavior-driven development (BDD) for .NET developers. SpecFlow will continue to remain free and open-source, and SpecMap, their Azure DevOps extension, will now be offered for free as well, backed by Tricentis. This is excellent news for BDD developers around the world!

Jira to Azure DevOps migration tool 1 year birthday
This great article from Solidify came out as a celebration of the 1 year anniversary of the Jira to Azure DevOps migration tool. The tool has 32 releases, 13 active contributors, and was downloaded 2400 times from places all over the globe! (I absolutely love seeing that map). In the article, Mathias Olausson shares the team’s learnings, customer impressions, and the 2020 roadmap. Thank you, Mathias!

Understanding Azure DevOps Variables [Complete Guide]
We have shared some blog posts on Azure Pipelines variables before, and there are many use-cases in which Azure DevOps variables are useful. In this very detailed guide, Adam Bertram reviews Pipeline variables, Environment variables, Variable Groups, secrets and more. Thank you, Adam!

A primer on using VMs with multi-stage pipelines
Speaking of the Environments in Azure YAML Pipelines, this article from Matteo Emili explains how to configure and use the new target environment option – virtual machines, with YAML Pipelines. Thank you, Matteo!

Fully isolated private Agents for Azure Pipelines in Azure Container Instances
For some purposes, having private agents works better than using the cloud-hosted ones. Yet, when running on private agents, you can sometimes face issues with job isolation. In this blog, Henry Been shares how to run Azure DevOps private agents on Azure Container Instances, having a fully-isolated container image for every job. Thank you, Henry!

What is Azure DevOps? | A DevOpsGroup Tutorial
This 2-minute animated overview from the DevOps Group is a great resource you can send to someone who is just learning about Azure DevOps, or considering migrating from older versions of Azure DevOps Server (TFS) to Azure DevOps.

That’s it for this week! And if you are in the Seattle area, don’t forget to check out the first-ever DeliveryConf!

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!