Agile Hive - SAFe in Jira vs. Azure DevOps Server

Daily activity management by using various kind of boards is very helpful to start the day with. Also, Backlog management is very good so it helps to keep track on the prioritized items. This can be used for all kind of Scrum activities by the Scrum master even for the Story management too. Also, it provides the required hierarchy levels, artifacts, boards, and workflows as an application in Jira. There is nothing to be shared as less appropriate while using SAFe.

Incentivized

In our case it was best suited when we started working remotely, we were able to track everything in out projects easily, able to share our codes, give reviews for the codes and also create integration and deployment CI/CD plans for the release and testing. It helped our team members with the productivity, early prototyping and release. Create summarised reports of different aspect of our projects. Even in other scenarios it is one of the best tools to use for collaboration and project management. I haven't found any specific scenario where it is not appropriate

Incentivized

• Team's progress.
• Risk Management.
• Visual representations - Dashboards.

Incentivized

• Vast range of Template for Automated Build and Release Pipeline with option to have conditional triggers
• Code repository mechanism is aligned with GIT which is a well known public repository system
• Bug Management is also an integral feature of this tool
• Dashboard creation option of Build and Release pipeline is also available

Incentivized

• it is not possible to plan if teams have different sprint length
• zoom into one sprint and then also zoom out to have big picture
• names of user stories are not good to read because of static big picture

Incentivized

• Searching through code can be somewhat cumbersome. It would be nice if there was a way to do general searches in certain areas of the system.
• Without proper training, the system can be confusing to navigate. This issue can be prevented with good training but it is something to be aware of.
• Navigation can be clunky at times depending on where you are in the system. For power users, this is not a huge deal but it is a tad bit annoying.

Incentivized

Because we are a Microsoft Gold Partner we utilize most of their software and we have so much invested in Team Foundation Server now it would take a catastrophic amount of time and resources to switch to a different product.

Incentivized

It has in general a good usability, but there are some downsides, the big picture view of the entire product increment is too static, so there is no zoom in or zoom out. Mostly throughout planning it is necessary to zoom in to a sprint level and manage the user stories there. Also, the pig picture view has some limitations, because you cannot read the entire user story name (boxes are too small).

Incentivized

For standard users the interface is friendly. but if you are a manager some tools are a little confusing to use, like the query system that you always need to create from scratch. Templates should be more helpful for queries and for standard procedures that you need to duplicate PBIs over time. The search history of Work Items is a little painful to use.

Incentivized

I have not had to use the support for Azure DevOps Server. There have never been any issues where I was not able to figure it out or quickly resolve. Our Scrum Master has used support before though, and the service has always been prompt and clear with a customer-focus

Incentivized

Do research beforehand and, if possible, do a trial run before implementing into production environment.

Incentivized

With Jira Software alone it is also possible to plan a SAFe product increment planning, but it would be nearly impossible to see the overall big picture of all product teams involved in a release train. So, the planning on sprint level for one team would be more efficient, but the planning for a whole quarter with all dependencies across teams would be not feasible to present. Therefore, Agile SAFe enables value trains an efficient way to plan a product increment.

Incentivized

Azure DevOps is a fully integrated solution that solves all of the problems that our separate tools did in a much easier-to-use way. Before we implemented DevOps we had three different solutions that we had to integrate with each other and required a lot of manual intervention to make sure they worked correctly.

Incentivized

• More transparency.
• Better product decisions.
• Saving time and resources.
• Less critical dependencies.

• It has streamlined the pipeline and project management for our agile effort.
• It has helped our agile team get organized since that is a new methodology being leveraged within the Enterprise.
• The calendar has improved visibility into different OOOs across the project team since we all come from different departments across the larger organization.

Incentivized