Azure DevOps has six major pillars which helped it to shape as complete ALM offering in the the cloud. Let’s briefly look into the the major pillars of Azure DevOps

Azure Boards is a place to manage and plan all of your work. All ideas and business requirements for your software can be captured here. You can create epics, features, user stories and then estimate them and plan capacity of your team members and start the sprint. Additionally you can have a real time view of the work item progression in Kanban boards, sprint burn down charts.

Azure Repos supports various source control system like Azure Git, Public GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, Microsoft’s own Team foundation version control (TFVC), External Git. You can choose any one of the repositories for your choice for software development and source code. Once development is done developers can create a pull request with their changes, send it for code review and take part of a collaborative development environment.

Azure Pipelines are used for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) of your code. It allows you to ship your code faster. Once your code is developed and committed to the repos, a build gets triggered in the build pipeline. This build pipeline gets the latest code from the repos, builds them in the build agent. On a successful build, the build artifacts gets published using Release pipeline in your targeted deployment environment.

Azure Test Plans is for planning and executing your manual, automated and load test cases. Once the build is succeeded test engineers can run a set of tests on the build for verification and validation of the desired functionality. And they can raise and log any defects or observation on failure of any of the planned test scenarios in the Azure Boards.

Azure Artifacts manages your private NuGet, npm, Maven packages in a private feed. You can integrate this feed in your favourite IDE such as Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code and restore the packages from this feed while development. Additionally you can integrate this feed in the build pipeline and restore packages from this private repository. Azure Artifacts helps a lot where there are a lot of shared common packages in use in the application and you want to control standards, version of those cross cutting atrifacts.

Azure Overview gives real time insights of the project such as teams velocity, CI/CD results, number of defects raised vs solved at any point of time to name a few. Executive dashboards can be created with inbuilt capability of it. These dashboard helps greatly for executive status reporting with risk and quality matrices.

Additionally it supports creating Wiki pages for the project. Wiki pages can be used to create any documents/ manual which are relevant for the ongoing or a completed project.