Microsoft Azure DevOps is a tool designed to streamline the entire software development lifecycle, promoting collaboration, automation, and continuous delivery. Azure DevOps offers a unified platform with a suite of tools that enables development teams to plan, build, test, and deploy applications efficiently.
Teams use Azure DevOps to supercharge their processes, another great thing about Azure DevOps is the integrations, awesome tools that help to make the development process even better. Through careful customization, you can ensure that your setup is just right for your team and for your organization.
A great way of getting a sense of what tools are available is to look at what’s trending; after all, effective apps often gain rapid traction and ratings. Let's explore some of these applications and integrations.
This list of apps would help you choose the right integrations for your team. You can install these apps from the marketplace and also find extensive reviews for each app so you know if they are right for you.
Azure DevOps App 1: Code Search
Code search is a free tool that helps teams quickly and efficiently find relevant information across all of their projects, this is especially important for big teams running multiple projects simultaneously. You can easily search through your repositories using this integration. This app currently has over 195,000 installs.
Get Code Search in the Microsoft Azure DevOps Marketplace
Azure DevOps App 2: Pull Request Merge Conflict Extension
This tool helps to resolve pull request merge conflicts on the web. Before a Git pull request can be completed, any conflicts with the target branch must be resolved. This extension helps development teams to resolve these conflicts on the web, as part of the pull request merge, instead of performing the merge and resolving conflicts in a local clone.
You can also filter conflicts by path, name, file type, resolution state, and more. This app is a free app by Microsoft Devlabs currently with over 70,000 installs
Get Pull Request Merge Conflict Extension in the Microsoft Azure DevOps Marketplace
Azure DevOps App 3: Retrospectives
Team Retrospectives, a Microsoft Garage project, is an extension for Azure DevOps that provides a first-class experience for retrospectives and general feedback board scenarios. With this integration, you can collect feedback on project milestones, organize and prioritize, and create and track actionable tasks to help your team improve over time. The app is optimized for both desktop and mobile and is also a free app.
Get Retrospectives in the Microsoft Azure DevOps Marketplace
Azure DevOps App 4: Azure Jira Integration
Azure DevOps For Jira is a new contender in the Azure DevOps and Jira integrations spaces - with this app throughout the development process, your team can follow closely on Jira every linked branch, commits, pull requests and merges made on Azure DevOps - Imagine tracking a whole build with just a few Jira card issues
Your team automatically eliminates manual updates in the development process, the team can simply focus on building and deployment while Azure DevOps for Jira takes care of updating tickers and progress boards. By leveraging the strengths of both platforms, you can achieve end-to-end automation of your software development lifecycle. From version control to continuous
Get Azure Jira Integration in the Atlassian Marketplace
Azure DevOps App 5: Microsoft Teams Integration
Many teams find this integration very useful, with the Microsoft Teams app, integration, you can subscribe to notifications to monitor your pipeline, repositories and work items from the Teams channel. Users can also take actions like approving deployments or creating new work items in Azure Boards from Teams.
You can also keep track of your project by adding your favourite Azure boards dashboard directly into Microsoft Teams.
The Microsoft Teams Integration is a free app and you can get it in the Microsoft Azure DevOps Marketplace here
Azure DevOps App 6: Estimate – Microsoft DevLabs
With this integration, you can select work from an iteration, query, or backlog, estimate the effort of those items with your team, and immediately update the work items. This app also makes estimating and planning fun, members of the team can estimate efforts on each task like it is a game of poker.
Get Estimate – Microsoft DevLabs in the Microsoft Azure DevOps Marketplace
Azure DevOps App 7: Test & Feedback
This app helps the whole team be a part of the testing/ quality process of development. With this integration, users can test web apps and give feedback. Teams can also create issues, tasks, and feedback response work items to send feedback or report issues and automatically attach all the captured information. This is a free app with over 130,000 downloads.
Get Test & Feedback in the Microsoft Azure DevOps Marketplace
Azure DevOps App 8: Sonar Cube
SonarQube enables you to continuously inspect the Code Quality and Security of your codebases, all while empowering your development team. With SonarCube, you can analyze over 25 popular programming languages including C#, VB Shop , JavaScript, TypeScript and C++.
SonarQube easily pairs up with your Azure DevOps environment and tracks down bugs, security vulnerabilities and code smells.
You can learn more about Sonar Cube and get it in the Microsoft Azure DevOps Marketplace
Azure DevOps App 9: Team Project Health
This app helps to provide an overview of the progress and health of your builds. You can also add the overall status of your builds and releases to your dashboard, using the Build Health Overview and Release Health Overview widgets.
The widgets change colours based on the status of the build. Colour green if everything is healthy, blue if anything is building, and red if anything has failed. This app has a 4/5 marketplace rating.
Get Team Project Health in the Microsoft Azure DevOps Marketplace
Azure DevOps App 10: Folder Management
With this folder management extension, you can now quickly create repository folders right from the web, instead of going through the long process of cloning the source repository locally, making the change, and then committing it back to the server.
This is especially useful for non-developers used to working on the web.
Get Folder Management in the Microsoft Azure DevOps Marketplace
Azure DevOps App 11: Work Item Visualization
This application by Microsoft Devlabs helps teams to visualise work items from within the work item form. In Azure DevOps you can add, edit and display work items in query results and various boards.
This app is free to use with over 50,000 downloads.
Get Work Item Visualization in the Microsoft Azure DevOps Marketplace
Azure DevOps App 12: Personas
This app simply helps your team to create personas that would help them build the right products and features. Users can also map created personas to work items using tags. It’s such an easy-to-use app that helps your development team keep the end users in focus.
Get Personas in the Microsoft Azure DevOps Marketplace
Azure DevOps App 13: Azure DevOps Confluence Connector
Azure DevOps Confluence integration helps create better documentation by bringing necessary data to Confluence from Microsoft Azure DevOps. With a rating of 3/4 in the Atlassian marketplace, this integration packs a lot of value for teams that want to enhance collaborative efforts.
Azure DevOps Confluence integration supports the following Microsoft Azure DevOps objects and links:
- Single Azure DevOps work item
- Azure DevOps Shared Search Query
- Azure DevOps build pipelines status and details
- Azure DevOps search items
Get Azure DevOps Confluence Connector in the Atlassian Marketplace
Azure DevOps App 14: CatLight
The CatLight app shows desktop notifications when builds, releases, pull requests, and tasks need your attention. The app will display an overall status in the tray to remind you about open action items.
With the Catlight app, your team can select what builds to monitor, and CatLight will alert you about important events.
Get CatLight in the Microsoft Azure DevOps Marketplace
Azure DevOps App 15: GitHub Integration for Azure Pipelines
With this integration, you can continuously build, test, and deploy from GitHub to any platform and cloud
Azure Pipelines offers cloud-hosted pipelines for Linux, macOS, and Windows with 10 free parallel jobs and unlimited minutes for open-source projects.
Summary
In this piece, we’ve covered the following apps:
- Code Search - Search for information across all your project - in the Microsoft Azure DevOps Marketplace
- Pull Request Merge Conflict Extension - Easily resolve pull merge conflict on the web - in the Microsoft Azure DevOps Marketplace
- Retrospectives - Collect feedback on project milestones - in the Microsoft Azure DevOps Marketplace
- Azure DevOps For Jira - follow closely on Jira every linked branch, commits, pull requests and merges made on Azure DevOps
- Microsoft Team Integration - notifications to monitor your pipeline, repositories and work items from the Teams channel -
- Estimate Microsoft DevLabs- estimate the effort of work items with your team
- Test & Feedback - the whole team can test web apps and give feedback
- SonarCube - pairs up with your Azure DevOps environment and tracks down bugs, security vulnerabilities and code smells.
- Team Project Health - provide an overview of the progress and health of your builds
- Folder management - create repository folders right from the web
- Work Item Visualization - visualise work items from within the work item form
- Personas - helps your team to create personas and map them to work items
- Azure DevOps Confluence Connector - get necessary data to Confluence from Microsoft Azure DevOps.
- CatLight - shows desktop notifications when builds, releases, pull requests, and tasks need your attention
- Githhub Integration For Azure Pipelines - continuously build, test, and deploy from GitHub to any platform and cloud Azure Pipelines offers
These are 15 of the top Azure DevOps apps on the Marketplace right now – and they can add plenty value to your development process, helping you get work done better and faster. Nevertheless, there are many more apps out there.
