Is there an actual technical point beyond ”MS bad” for this sentiment?
Honestly asking, as I’ve been mostly hearing positive things about AzDO, and from developers of all people.
Honestly asking, as I’ve been mostly hearing positive things about AzDO, and from developers of all people.
(One of the most recent signs of this crazy zombie state that a recent feature for AzDO was given the absurd only Microsoft could do brand name "GitHub Advanced Secure for Azure DevOps", and it is indeed a bundle of GitHub features several years old at this point finally provided to AzDO users. Other signs include all sorts of AzDO libraries and roadmaps and related repos openly hosted on GitHub with last updated dates in 2019 and 2020.)
From an outsider perspective, Microsoft probably has a lot of sentimental and internal engineering reasons it doesn't want to truly wrap up so much of its operations in North Carolina (AzDO's ancestral home going back to early days of TFS), but the writing seems to be on the wall that what's left is a skeleton crew mostly working for GitHub full time and then sort of applying things part time back to AzDO. It doesn't seem to me to be sustainable long term, and every day it feels more like an Old Yeller situation where Microsoft is just prolonging the inevitable and making the pain worse for everyone involved.
The old issues + tags + milestones was perfect. Now it’s the same needlessly-heavy thing as all the rest, with their reimagined “projects” thingy.
But then again I’ve not once seen a PM embrace any version of GitHub’s project management, with the only explanation forthcoming being “it’s confusing for non-technical users” (fucking how? More confusing than Jira or Asana? No friggin’ way) so maybe they have to shit it up and make it hard to use and easy to get lost in or miss info in, to get any traction with PMs.
It definitely seems one of those sorts of "every system PMs touch is doomed to become unmanageable complexity" laws and GitHub "Projects" does seem to be exponentially closer to being "Jira 2: Electric Boogaloo" every day.
It was intended to be a SAAS version of the on Prem offerings MS has provided since before GitHub even existed.
The boards are terrible, the UI is hard, the permissions are incomprehensible, it doesn't even integrate that nicely with Azure.
On paper it does everything, it practice it can be made to do everything, but it's like getting citrus drenched sandpaper papercuts every day.
As I said the positivive sentiments I heard came from developers, and TFA is about CI (rather than boards etc. that JIRA handles, so is there maybe anything remotely positive in how AzDO implements CI, git integration, testing, etc? Or is it just rotten to the core?
Hard to imagine someone would hate it more than Bitbucket Pipelines or, god forbid, Bamboo. Buuut I’m more than open-minded if need be.