As part of our quarterly update, we’d like to share with you some of the highlights from the previous quarter and discuss what we have planned for this upcoming one. Each of the highlighted features includes a link to our public roadmap project where you’ll find more details on the item and where you can check its status.
Azure Boards
Customers have long desired the ability to view work items in a roadmap/timeline display. The Delivery Plans extension was a good start, but it is missing some key pieces of functionality. In Q4 of 2020, we are updating Delivery Plans, so it is part of the core product and building out some of those necessary features. These include:
- Allow work items to visually span sprint boundaries
- Support work items that are not assigned to an iteration path (start date and target date)
- Access to view existing plans for stakeholders
- Track dependencies across work items
- Roll up information to show the progress of child and grandchild work items
We will be enabling a private preview starting in mid-late October. For those customers who are interested in getting early access, please email us with your organization name.
Azure Pipelines
YAML pipeline runs today can be paused only when performing checks on critical resources like environments, service connections, etc. There is no way to pause a run independent of these resources. We will soon be rolling out the capability to pause a pipeline run at a chosen point and seek manual inputs or validations from your peers. The pipeline run can be resumed or rejected by peers with additional comments.
Azure Artifacts
The Azure Artifacts team is moving to a new architecture for propagating updates from upstream sources, in response to customer feedback. Previously, upstream sources were polled only once every three hours. This injected latency and script complexity into build activities for customers.
With this upcoming feature, we are switching to a publication-subscription model, removing the need to poll upstream sources for changes. By the end of Q4, customers of Azure DevOps Services can expect the latency to drop significantly: a matter of seconds in the best case, up to a minute in the worst case.
This will be a behind-the-scenes improvement. When this feature is released it will be automatically applied to your organization for your private upstreams. We plan to make this improvement available for your public upstreams as well, it’s on the roadmap!
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