Managing DevOps: What Microsoft Azure offers an agile team

Developers in the Azure ecosystem are hard at work every hour of the day somewhere in the world, preparing new services, applications, and integrations for the cloud.

With distributed teams building and deploying their code on cloud-based platforms, operational needs in the software industry have rapidly evolved in recent years for people responsible for coding, testing, documenting, and managing products.

Back in 2018, Microsoft took a step forward in its support of DevOps (a portmanteau of software development and IT operations) with its introduction of Azure DevOps, a cloud toolset that includes Pipelines, Boards, Artifacts, Repos, Test Plans, and more, designed to help teams ship software products.

In recent announcements, especially at the 2021 Ignite conference, Microsoft emphasized themes like empowering developers and "software excellence."

But what skills and strategies are needed for today's development teams to succeed? MSCloudNews reached out to experts in the Azure community for their thoughts.

Agile in action

In an earlier era of software development, "waterfall" project management dominated the software creation process. This model focused on substantial upfront planning and commitment followed by long periods of development and testing against an aging set of requirements and product specifications. But Agile methodologies have steadily gained momentum over the last two decades, introducing a variety of iterative approaches to development that have that offer an alternative to some well-known waterfall weaknesses that can often lead projects to fail. Chief among those problems in a waterfall model is the assumption that it is possible for a project team to lay out all requirements, estimates, schedules, and resource plans upfront and get a successful product as a result months or years later.