What is Azure DevOps?
Azure DevOps was first introduced in 2014 as a way to bring together the power of Azure, the agility of DevOps, and the reliability of Azure. Since its inception, Azure DevOps has grown to be a powerful tool for managing and deploying applications in the cloud. However, recent changes to Azure DevOps may signal that the platform is being deprecated.
Is Azure DevOps Being Deprecated?
First, Microsoft is discontinuing the Azure DevOps Services Preview Program. This program allowed users to try out new features and get early feedback. With the program ending, feedback will no longer be available to help improve Azure DevOps.
Second, Microsoft is introducing a new tool called Azure Automation. Azure Automation is a machine learning platform that can automate the deployment of applications and services. Azure Automation is similar to Azure DevOps Services, but it is not a preview program.
Finally, Microsoft has been actively investing in its GitHub Enterprise platform, migrating CI / CD pipelines, issue tracking, and other key DevOps activities to GitHub. It is understood that the future platform for CI/CD and DevOps will be GitHub, with all new future development being focused on its features, such as Advanced Security, Codespaces, and Copilot.
Why Are Companies Switching to SpiraTeam?
With the eventual retirement of ADO likely, companies are looking to migrate to GitHub and take advantage of the new CI/CD features while at the same time having the key lifecycle management functionality they have gotten used to in ADO (boards, test management, project management, etc.). With SpiraTeam and GitHub, you have the best of both worlds - modern agile project management, requirements and test management, issue tracking, reporting, and support for scaled agile by upgrading to SpiraPlan.
So, with the increased demand from companies for an easy migration path to SpiraTeam or SpiraPlan, we have just made some major enhancements to the Azure DevOps / TFS migration wizard that improves the migration process and supports additional artifacts and work items.
Improvements to the ADO Migration Tool
Ability to Customize Work Item Mapping
In the previous version of the migration tool, it would automatically choose which ADO work items would map to SpiraTeam requirements and incidents. This meant that if you had customized your ADO/TFS installation considerably, some of the work items would migrate as the wrong artifact type.
In this new version, you can choose which SpiraTeam artifact type should be used for each ADO work item type:
Support for Tasks and Requirements
In addition, the previous version of the migration tool was limited to importing: requirements, test cases, and incidents. The latest version adds support for tasks:
This means you can now import project backlog items such as Epics, Features, and User Stories and have the appropriate child tasks imported into SpiraTeam with the relationship between the tasks and the backlog items preserved.