Collaboration is a crucial element in software development; having the right collaboration tools can make a difference and boost the entire team’s productivity. Microsoft introduced its Application Lifecycle Management product with Team Foundation Server (aka TFS) on March 16th, 2006. This software had to be installed on a server within your network and had a user-based license. To reduce the complexity of setting up and maintaining the server, Microsoft released Visual Studio Online–an Azure-based, server-hosted version of TFS. Microsoft manages and administers the servers as well as taking care of backups. To clarify its commitment to agile and DevOps, Microsoft rebranded Visual Studio Online in 2015 as Visual Studio Team Services and later as Azure DevOps in 2018.

Since its beginning, this platform has changed significantly. For example, it introduced a customizable, task-based build service, release gates, and much more. Many organizations across the world made a significant investment to run their businesses on Azure DevOps. For this reason, after Microsoft announced the acquisition of GitHub in mid-2018, GitHub announced its automated workflow system, which is much like Azure Pipelines. It’s called GitHub Actions. Due to the switch, some companies became afraid of having to migrate their practices again. In the past few months, I have gotten several questions about whether it is still worth starting new projects on Azure DevOps, especially after the release of features like GitHub Advanced Security and GitHub Codespaces (similar to Visual Studio Codespaces). In this article, I’ll clarify the differences between these two platforms, and I’ll give you some advice on how you should be using them to your advantage.

Data Residency

To meet the needs of companies that want to keep their data within their network, both GitHub and Azure DevOps provide a server version of their platform. GitHub version is called GitHub Enterprise Server, and the Azure DevOps version is called Azure DevOps Server. Both versions require the client to install and maintain both software and machine.

On the other hand, there is a critical difference between their cloud-hosted version. While Azure DevOps Service allows you to choose the Azure region, which is closes to your organization’s location, to decrease the eventuality of networking latency during the creation of your organization (collection of projects). GitHub doesn’t provide this feature.

Project management and bug tracking

GitHub

At the core of GitHub project management, we can find the issues. This task can be used to track any work item, from feature to bugs, and can be sorted into a Kanban-style board for easy consultation. The issue’s description also supports markdown syntax. Adding a specific keyword #issue-number (ex: #3) can associate the issue with another one. Each issue can be assigned to multiple developers, be linked to pull requests, and have various labels assigned to it. One can link a pull request to an issue to show that a fix is in progress and automatically close the issue when someone merges the pull request.

GitHub Kanban board

• Lastly, multiple issues can be grouped into milestones that will give immediate feedback about the completion percentage. Milestones can also include a due date.

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