Articles tagged with azure-devops

Fri 13 December 2024

Journal 8 - What is the value?

The real question is not about the tech-cool factor or simplicity; it is all about uncovering the true value.

Fri 29 November 2024

Journal 7 - Embracing a New Mindset for Empowerment!

Exploring innovative automation strategies to empower engineers with the right tools and support, exactly when they need them.

Wed 20 November 2024

Why is the Closed Date field empty in my work items?

More importantly, what is the issue and how do we resolve it?

Fri 15 November 2024

Rotting Pull Requests - Detection And Actioning

Explore the root cause of un-actioned pull-requests, how to detect and remedy (Part 1).

Wed 13 November 2024

Journal 6 - Empowerment through automation and artificial intelligence

Reshaping the way we work, creating new opportunities to empower engineers by reducing repetitive tasks, enhancing productivity, and enabling focus on high-value activities.

Wed 23 October 2024

Agile Planning with Azure DevOps

Recalling the recent agile planning session hosted by common engineering during the +1 innovation and planning iteration.

Sat 19 October 2024

Azure DevOps Pipeline Blueprints - Open Source Software Sync 20241019

Refactor the building code calls.

Mon 19 August 2024

Azure DevOps Pipeline Blueprints - Open Source Software Sync 20240816

Improving the configuration file user experience.

Mon 17 June 2024

Automate Azure DevOps work item state transitions like a Pro

Maintain your backlog by changing the status of work items according to the status of their subitems.

Fri 07 June 2024

Exploring the future Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) flow

Looking for Insights and Feedback from other pioneers of continuous SDLC improvements.

Fri 10 May 2024

Technology Framework Monitor - Open Source Software Sync 20240510

Shake Off the Dust: Our TFM Software Spring Cleaning!

Fri 03 May 2024

Why Metrics?

Why should I be concerned about metrics as long as my code works?

Wed 10 April 2024

Azure DevOps Pipeline Blueprints - Open Source Software Sync 20240405

Adding a new blueprint - webapp.

Tue 02 April 2024

Technology Framework Monitor - Open Source Software Sync 20240322

The broader our scanning efforts, the more technical debt we uncover, enabling proactive resolution.

Mon 01 April 2024

Azure DevOps Pipeline Blueprints - Open Source Software Sync 20240322

Second update to complete the 101 simplification.

Wed 20 March 2024

Azure DevOps Pipeline Blueprints - Open Source Software Sync 20240318

Constantly think about how you could be doing things better.” - Elon Musk.

Mon 11 March 2024

Back to Basics: Open Source Software (OSS)

Raising awareness of our open-source projects for knowledge sharing.

Wed 06 March 2024

Back to Basics: Dealing with Technical Debt

Breaking Free: A Guide to Tackling Technical Debt Head-On

Fri 01 March 2024

Cheat sheet to migrate generic v1 templates to v2

Questioning the recommended approach to upgrades and the use of generic templates.

Fri 16 February 2024

Back to Basics: Why are we moving to v2 CI/CD Blueprints for Azure Pipelines?

Understanding why we are disabling classic Azure Pipelines and embracing YAML-based Azure Pipelines.

Mon 12 February 2024

Back to Basics: Pull-Request (PR) Validations

Why run a validation build in your pull-request?

Fri 09 February 2024

Back to Basics: Kanban

"Kanban" is Japanese for "visual card" or "signal."

Mon 05 February 2024

Back to Basics: WIP Limit

Dealing with a Kanban Board meltdown, by controlling the work in progress.

Wed 24 January 2024

Why Mutant Testing?

What is Mutant testing and why is it so valuable?

Fri 19 January 2024

Why release on demand?

Exploring the deployment rings, continuous delivery and deployment, to discuss release on demand.

Tue 16 January 2024

What are all those Warning and Information outputs from a build and why should I care if its not an error?

Reasons why is it important to pay attention to all the warning and information message generated when compiling your code.

Wed 20 December 2023

DevOps Vancouver Meetup - Engineering Empowerment Session Preparations

Help us prepare our meetup session to ensure we cover what is interesting for YOU!

Mon 04 December 2023

Mastering Software Development: A Deep Dive into Trunk-Based Pull Request Workflow

How to implement a pull request workflow within the context of a trunk-based development.

Tue 19 September 2023

Let us Elevate Our CI/IaC/CD Azure Pipeline Flow Together!

Streamline Your Process: Isolating the Provision and Deployment Steps for Efficiency?

Wed 23 August 2023

Navigating Azure DevOps Complexity: Harnessing Objects to Simplify YAML Template Parameter Management

Seizing the chance to enhance and optimize our CI/CD/IaC pipelines.

Wed 02 August 2023

Why do we care about infrastructure-as-code (IaC)?

Our vision is *aC, but to avoid boiling the ocean, we will focus on an overview on IaC today.

Sun 23 July 2023

Water Cooler Talk - Why Azure Devops is not a silver bullet

Yes, I LOVE Azure DevOps, but it is not the answer to the universe.

Mon 05 June 2023

Azure Boards Tips - Retain hierarchy with filter

Why does the hierarchy view [not] vanish when selecting a filter?

Wed 12 April 2023

What keeps us awake at night - Technical Debt

Empower engineering without compromising security

Sun 02 April 2023

Azure Boards Tips - Stop messing with our backlog!

A few useful "did you know" tips when using Azure Boards.

Mon 06 March 2023

Automation Bad Day

Clearly yesterday was a bad day.

Wed 22 February 2023

Azure DevOps Pipeline OSS v2.1 Flow

Two pull requests with pipeline updates for your perusal.

Wed 15 February 2023

Azure DevOps Transient Faults

Be careful not to annoy Azure DevOps with your automated maintenance jobs!

Fri 03 February 2023

Azure Devops simplicity to rule them all

Keep Azure DevOps setup simple and avoid a lot of pain and waste!

Fri 13 January 2023

Pull Request empowered by engineering practices

Pull Requests (PR) enable us improve built-in quality, engineering practices, and streamline our continuous integration pipelines.

Wed 28 December 2022

Azure Pipelines Conditional Logic

Make your YAML pipelines more versatile with conditional expressions.

Fri 23 December 2022

Azure Boards Tips for Operations Teams

A few useful "did you know" tips when using Azure Boards for Operational-type teams.

Fri 09 December 2022

Azure Pipelines Blueprint QA Integration

WHERE and HOW to integrate quality assurance into our OSS pipeline blueprints.

Fri 02 December 2022

Azure Boards Tips

A few useful "did you know" tips when using Azure Boards.

Tue 08 November 2022

Our open-source pipeline blueprints have landed!

Lifting the hood of our consistent, standardized, and self-service based Azure Pipelines.

Fri 30 September 2022

Built-in Quality

Ensuring that our solutions meet quality guardrails and governance from ideation to deprecation.

Wed 21 September 2022

Our road to OSS Blueprints - Suppress CD when pipeline runs within Pull Request

A glimpse at our OSS progress and how we use the same pipeline in and out of pull requests.

Wed 07 September 2022

Visualizing work item dependencies in Azure Boards

We want to plan and manage dependencies across multiple teams areas, providing awareness of the dependencies in a simple way.

Fri 05 August 2022

Automation and the great unknown

Inadvertently restricting access to thousands of pipelines with a simple automated task group insertion.

Mon 17 January 2022

Make your pipeline badges more compact and meaningful

Tired of cluttering your dashboards with duplicated waste?

Tue 16 November 2021

Streamlining your pipeline using the magic of YAML-base Azure Pipelines

Teleport to the future, to optimize the YAML-based Azure Pipeline approvals.

Tue 02 November 2021

Streamlining your pipeline approvals, without flooding DevSecOps with noise

Back to the future, to optimize the Classic Azure Pipeline approvals.

Wed 08 September 2021

Two ways to share your toolbox with your pipelines

Let us review two strategies to share scripts and config files with your Azure (YAML) Pipelines.

Sat 24 July 2021

Pipelines - Meet our second-generation app-type blueprints

Our quest for continuous improvement, simplicity, consistency, enablement, and automation has taken us into a realm of Azure Pipelines that amaze even our most critical engineers.

Thu 08 July 2021

Gotchas when sharing variables with Azure DevOps stages and jobs

Understanding and avoiding gotchas that may keep you up at 2AM, troubleshooting YAML-based Azure Pipelines

Mon 05 July 2021

Self-service automation - A dream turns into reality

Automate a “hello world in less than 1min”, also referred to as our “walking skeleton”.

Mon 21 June 2021

Why we should (not) care about Pipelines!?!

Enabling engineering to continuously build, validate, and deploy secure solutions to delight our customers

Sun 13 June 2021

Quick Reference Sheet for Pipeline Terminology

Summarising the core terminology and lifetime of our pipelines.

Wed 02 June 2021

Manage your Azure DevOps User Access Levels through automation

Quick overview how our Azure DevOps access level audits and management automation using PowerShell, REST APIs, and Richard's WIKI Updater task.

Wed 05 May 2021

Enable Agile, Kanban, Scrum, or SAFe with Azure DevOps

Use Azure Boards to visualise a variety of processes using the Agile process in a single Azure DevOps project.

Fri 30 April 2021

Quick Reference Sheet for Application-type Blueprint-based Pipelines

Summarising the main points of our 2nd generation app-type blueprint-based pipelines.

Wed 28 April 2021

Azure DevOps Experimentation - YAML Conditionals, Parameters, and Triggers

Snippets of common questions and issues from Azure Pipeline workshops and support calls. Today's snippet includes conditionals, parameters, and triggers.

Mon 26 April 2021

How to share variables amongst Azure Pipeline agents

As per documentation, output variables can be used across stages in an Azure YAML-based pipeline. I will share a few turbulent moments we experienced while troubleshooting this feature in one of our pipeline blueprints.

Fri 23 April 2021

Part 8: Pipelines - From CI to CD and beyond in one pipeline

Continuous Deployment is a pivotal ingredient of a healthy DevOps mindset and our ability to delight end-users with continuous value. It is the holy grail of our profession.

Tue 13 April 2021

Quick Reference Sheet for YAML and Generic Blueprint-based Pipelines

Summarising the main points of YAML syntax, within the context of our generic blueprint-based pipelines.

Mon 12 April 2021

Part 7: Pipelines - There is more! Simplicity and enablement, courtesy of the app-type blueprint-based YAML pipelines

Do you want to own two or seventy five dozen lines of pipeline code per application? The choice is yours!

Sat 13 March 2021

Pipeline-as-code wrapped with Pull Requests

This post attempts to give our critics some answers and scratch the surface of the possibilities and values of our new blueprint-based pipelines.

Fri 12 March 2021

Find the capabilities and IP addresses of an Azure DevOps agent

How to find more information on hosted Azure DevOps agents, such as capabilities and IP addresses.

Fri 12 March 2021

Wandering down memory lane - feature flags

Use feature flags to fine-tune each release in production.

Tue 02 March 2021

Part 6: Pipelines - Gotcha! The generic blueprint-based YAML pipeline simplicity

Neither the bootstrap nor generic templates are rocket science, and the YAML-based pipelines are as complex as you make them.

Thu 28 January 2021

Part 5: Pipelines - Blueprints to fuel consistency and enablement

Think of blueprints and associated templates as re-usable LEGO blocks, ranging from a bag of "do it yourself" blocks, to complex and detailed kits, such as the Imperial Star Destroyer.

Wed 13 January 2021

Part 4: Pipelines - Magic of queue time assembly

We can use the power of the new multi-stage YAML pipelines to make even our most critical security engineers smile from ear to ear.

Mon 04 January 2021

Part 3: Pipelines - Basic building blocks as templates and sprinkling on telemetry

With the support from all people, YAML templates support our five (5) core goals and pillars of our common engineering system.

Mon 21 December 2020

Part 2: Pipelines - Introduction, variables and why spaces matter

The new Azure DevOps YAML pipelines have been the focus of innovation, enabling engineering to treat pipelines as code.

Sat 19 December 2020

Part 1: Pipelines - Why bother and what are our nightmares and options?

Pipelines enable engineering to continuously deliver value, map and improve their processes and workflows, promoting consistency and reliability across the organisation.

Thu 22 October 2020

The clash of Azure DevOps Kanban fields and Shared Area Paths

Shared area paths can introduce inconsistency and confusion.

Wed 21 October 2020

Searching for common nodes across area paths

How can we find area path with specific text in their name?

Tue 20 October 2020

Use Active Directory Groups in your unified classic CI CD pipelines

Instead of managing permissions for users in Azure DevOps, we use Azure Active Directory groups to fine tune permissions

Tue 20 October 2020

Use the move to team project feature with caution!

The "Move to Team Project" feature can reset your work item state and dates

Mon 19 October 2020

Pull Request is your friend not foe!

There is a debate around the value of pull requests (PR), fueled by unfortunate misunderstandings.