"Every business is a software business." ~ Walt S Humprey.
The father of Quality in Software and CMMI said this almost a two decades ago and the need of building software(s) is increasing at an exponential, there is a super strong need to build fast and make your software available at the fastest pace. So, there are a numerous tools available out there. But let's discuss a couple of problems and see what is the solution for the same.
PLAN WELL and MANAGE WELL
- The very first thing is plan your work. What do you want to build?
- Plan your team, who all are going to be the contributor(s) of the project
- Give platform to your team to break the modules into task(s) where you, the scrum master or the manager can keep a track of it
- Set goals, in a span of time what is it that you want to work on?
- The team should be able to collaborate together even if it is geographically dispersed.
The answer to solving the above five problems is Azure Boards.
USE A SOURCE CONTROL:
- When you have multiple developers working together and you want everyone to contribute in parallel
- When you want the ability to look into the history of a file
- When you want to be able to browse all the code from your browser and still keep it 100% safe
- When you want to prevent the untested work to go into staging or production
- When you want to review code
The answer to solving the above five problems is
Azure Repos.
So, the above two are going to solve your problems to a great extent but you may want to ensure that your team did not introduce any breaking changes accidentally, you would like the changes to get deployed on to your environment automatically, you would like to ensure that the tests are all passing and want to avoid copying and pasting code from one project to another but use central artifacts as a nuget or an npm package. Well, we'll discuss that in the coming posts but let me tell you that the answer to all the problems under one single roof is
Sounds Amazing! But thinking that it must be very costly! No, no, no my dear friends, Azure Boards is 100% free for any number of projects you manage and for Azure Repos, 5 users are absolutely free but you can still have any number of stakeholders. So, as a manager, as a product owner all you need is Boards.
So, The crux of the story is Azure DevOps is the need of the hour.