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Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

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Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#51

Post by elmalto »

ethomson wrote: post #12

PM for Azure DevOps here. We've been investing heavily in our user experience and our CI/CD experience, so I'm sad to see that we've disappointed here. Some of these complaints I would agree with - in particularly, we're not (yet) caching build resources - though we're working on this now. But most of these complaints I was quite surprised to hear; not an experience I would want someone to have or what I see from the…

We use Azure DevOps extensively at my work and, after having used GitHub, Gitlab, self hosted solutions, Jenkins, TeamCity... DevOps ranks dead last.

It's the entire experience. The UI is terribly clunky everywhere. The worst for me are pull requests. Incredibly tough to work with people on a pull request. I can't even point you to "a" particular problem - for us it's broken everywhere. From the weird file comparison with overlays to the missing support for (us) important file formats like ipython notebooks. The way notifications bubble up in a facebook like format on a pull request. The emails that have 20000 lines and never the exact information I need. The amount of clicks to go from comparing two files to open the current version. Other people mentioned the lacking caching support for builds, so I am not going to go into more detail here. Another missing piece for me: Where are my statistics. I'd love to see commit, PR, response, comment etc statistics per team member / teams / groups.

Using Azure DevOps board is a nightmare of its own...

btw: most of these issues are part of the whole "azure" experience. The Azure portal suffers from the exact same interface issues of horizontally stacking fields. One wrong click and your last edits have disappeared into the ether

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#52

Post by cbHXBY1D »

ethomson wrote: post #13
markcubed wrote: post #2

While I certainly have had a few annoying issues myself, full credit to the team behind DevOps (nee VSTS) for doing an amazing job over the last >12 months to overhaul and improve the product. I have been impressed at the pace things are improving. I have not had the same issues with build machines disappearing into the ether (we use Windows hosts however) but definitely agree that the (lack of) caching is maddening.…

Thanks for the kind words; I agree that caching is a problem. We're working on it now.

Any idea on when it will land?

I'm on a team at building a C++ component and just installing boost can take over 20 minutes for a build.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#53

Post by userbinator »

Someone1234 wrote: post #32
ethomson wrote: post #12

PM for Azure DevOps here. We've been investing heavily in our user experience and our CI/CD experience, so I'm sad to see that we've disappointed here. Some of these complaints I would agree with - in particularly, we're not (yet) caching build resources - though we're working on this now. But most of these complaints I was quite surprised to hear; not an experience I would want someone to have or what I see from the…

> We've been investing heavily in our user experience and our CI/CD experience I'm on the "new" UI and I'm not seeing it. You've just re-skinned the same buggy and broken cruft that was there before. It reminds me of the Visual Studio 2019 blog posts about new icons, themes, and fonts as their big new features while ignoring the massive performance problems people have been asking about for years. DevOps with or with…

I don't think that's a lie. They have certainly invested heavily in changing the experience --- but unfortunately, and like many other products seem to be these days, just not in the way that you want.

(It's not just you. The "why did they spend all that effort to change things that didn't need to be changed" question has come up for me countless times upon seeing redesigns of other products.)

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#54

Post by harishkragarwal »

achievingApathy wrote: post #20

What I never really understood is why does Microsoft Test Manager only come with Visual Studio Enterprise? Do only enterprises test their software?

(Azure DevOps PM here) Test Manager comes with VS Enterprise, VS Test Professional, MSDN Subscriptions and is also available for direct purchase through https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms.vss-t.... You are welcome to take your pick from what suits your needs.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#56

Post by Twirrim »

mandeepj wrote: post #33
achievingApathy wrote: post #20

What I never really understood is why does Microsoft Test Manager only come with Visual Studio Enterprise? Do only enterprises test their software?

> Do only enterprises test their software? Microsoft also has operating expenses. They need to bring home some income to keep the lights on.

Isn't that what Azure is for? Use the software as a loss leader to get them using your services, which is where you make the real ongoing money.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#58

Post by markbnj »

> For a few hours, builds ran smoothly. As expected, eventually the agent died during a build. Builds sat queued, my frustration grew, and AWS notified my instance needed a doctor. After an hour I gave up hope for the unresponsive server and commanded it to reboot.

Sounds a lot like some process on the build server is leaking memory. We have a couple of older services that have this problem, and if we don't catch it early enough the server will become unresponsive and unable to even handle ssh connections.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#59

Post by markbnj »

zoeysaurusrex wrote: post #43
Someone1234 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We've been investing heavily in our user experience and our CI/CD experience I'm on the "new" UI and I'm not seeing it. You've just re-skinned the same buggy and broken cruft that was there before. It reminds me of the Visual Studio 2019 blog posts about new icons, themes, and fonts as their big new features while ignoring the massive performance problems people have been asking about for years. DevOps with or with…

Honestly, while your criticisms are mostly fair, your approach is really unprofessional here. Yes, Microsoft is a massive company, but human beings are making this and I’ll guarantee you none of them are happy with where the product is. Please consider showing some compassion. I’d also add that I use 2017 and 2019 daily, and build by build, I see massive improvements for performance.

I don't see anything at all unprofessional about that reply. It's critical, but it is not unprofessional imo.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#60

Post by eckza »

MisterKent wrote: post #19
ethomson wrote: post #12

PM for Azure DevOps here. We've been investing heavily in our user experience and our CI/CD experience, so I'm sad to see that we've disappointed here. Some of these complaints I would agree with - in particularly, we're not (yet) caching build resources - though we're working on this now. But most of these complaints I was quite surprised to hear; not an experience I would want someone to have or what I see from the…

The old UI was better, and forcing people to this weird pretty UI doesn't make sense. Several products aimed at tech people seem to make this mistake. We are power users, we don't want stuff hidden away. Stop having UX that's designed as if we were trying to browse twitter.

Looking right at you, JIRA.
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