Intro to DevOps concept
DevOps concept, founded on integrating Development & Operations and accompanied by agile project approach, is the DNA of software production that allows to shorten system development lifecycles with better quality. It covers all the production stages: planning, development, testing & deployment.
The examples of well-known collaborative DevOps tools categories are Kanban Boards to plan and track development and Source Code Management tools for code building, testing and deployment.
Azure DevOps, as other integrated DevOps solutions, allows you to manage your software projects via integrated set of services and tools across all project stages.
Below you can find few simple examples on how Azure DevOps dashboards can quickly make life easier for you and your Team, regardless of your role.
Why Dashboards? Rationale & examples
There are couple of good reasons:
- dashboards give you an opportunity to make quick informed decisions based on comprehensive visual representations of selected elements from your project without a need to deep dive into details, still giving you the option to drill down the dashboard with one click to see underlying details (like the list of tasks to be assigned)
- dashboards allow you to visualize the KPIs you want to track (like development velocity, burndown rate, sprint progress, bug rate, deployment path and more) to support or facilitate team meetings (sprint planning, sprint review, sprint retrospective)
illustrative example: Development progress charts
illustrative example: deployment progress boxes
- dashboards introduce a visual standard to your team that builds transparency, alignment between team members and significantly speeds up as well as simplifies the navigation through the project devops data for everyone (like high volume/complexity of workitems)
- dashboards can help you to keep consistency of your project data (like missing dates, tags, estimations etc) to make sure nothing is missing
illustrative example: devops data healthcheck boxes
Benefits of dashboards in a nut-shell
- Team alignment and common understanding
- Faster time boxes: sprint planning, sprint reviews or retrospectives
- Quick and easy navigation
- Controlled data consistency
I am curious how you manage your DevOps data to support your software projects?
In the mean-time, I wish you Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!