Azure DevOps Services vs. Planview AgilePlace

ADO is well suited for the visibility of day-to-day tasks and responsibilities as well as things such as Features, user stories, etc. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any scenario where it might not be well suited, as you can customize ADO to your liking to a degree.

AgilePlace is a great way for teams, or individuals, to bring visibility to the work in process and in their backlog. The color coding and icon use helps to quickly analyze the type of work or status of the work. The product team is doing a good job at listening to their user's feedback and implementing improvements. Where it falls short is when reporting needs to occur.

• Flexible Requirements Hierarchy Management: AZDO makes it easy to track items such as features or epics as a flat list, or as a hierarchy in which you can track the parent-child relationship.
• Fast Data Entry: AZDO was designed to facilitate quick data entry to capture work items quickly, while still enabling detailed capture of acceptance criteria and item properties.
• Excel Integration: AZDO stands out for its integration with MS Excel, which enables quick updates for bulk items.

Incentivized

• Okta Integration: We love using SSO for all our SaaS apps, and as new team members join, they can be automatically joined to the appropriate LeanKit boards.
• Filtering and viewing: Can filter and refine by several fields as well as custom fields. Assigned Users, Tagged, Card Type, Date, etc
• Their analytics and reporting can be helpful for PMs, especially if they have several teams they oversee.

Incentivized

• Need to make the changes so that it doesn't occupy most of the CPU utilization and memory
• Execution of Bulky SQl Queries leads to either the SQl being out of exception or the VS being unresponsive
• Integration with Microsoft products is easy, but with non-Microsoft products it is more difficult, and you have to make a lot of configuration changes to integrate
• With every upgrade of the Visual Studio, like from VS 2010 to VS 2013 , we need to upgrade our hardware/machine, as the VS hardware requirement also increases
• If code is getting compiled in one visual studio, like in VS 2010, that the same code could possibly give an error when compiled in VS 2013, due to certain changes in keyword, data format, etc., with the VS upgrade

Incentivized

• The formatting of what they call "cards" could be better. They can be clunky if you have a lot of text in just one.
• Needs better support for media, attachments.
• Not the most pretty interface in my opinion, though it works.

Incentivized

I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.

Incentivized

we are happy with the tool and the service and continuos improvement of the tool so there is no need yet to change to another one.

Azure DevOps is a powerful, complex cloud application. As such there are a number of things it does great and something where there is room for improvement. One of those areas would be in usability. In my opinion it relies too much on search. There is no easy way to view all projects or to group them in a logical way. You need to search for everything.

Incentivized

LeanKit isn't the best designed Kanban system I've seen, but overall it's pretty usable. The boards I've used are pretty complex, so it can be difficult to find things. I found that searching and filtering for specific cards was somewhat of a challenge. Dragging a card from one lane to another is kind of a fun way to get things done though.

Incentivized

Not experienced any outage

Incentivized

Larger boards take longer to load

Incentivized

When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.

Incentivized

Every time I have reached out to the AgilePlace support team I have received a timely response in addition to professional & personal feedback. Their consultants are knowledgeable and the management team is happy to jump in and help when needed.

Was not part of the process.

Incentivized

Very easy.

Incentivized

Jira is fantastic for project management and customer facing portal. It is not good for pure development (no integration with Git, pipeline management, automated testing features). If DevOps were to integrate and adopt the project features of Jira as well as the customer facing interfaces, I feel it would be a complete project management system.

Incentivized

Originally, we had evaluated two other tools next to Planview LeanKit: Kanbantool and Kanbanflow. The latter was a close contestant for productive use, as it was also very customizable and a joy to work with and look at. It also had lower user fees and a mobile integration. In the end, we picked Planview LeanKit because of several reasons: Aesthetics: The look was much more clean and professional. Reporting: It was obvious from the start that we could use Planview LeanKit as a tool for improvement. API: We needed to integrate the Kanban into our central systems and Planview LeanKit API was (and still is) a way to do it. Card Headers: This sounds like a simple thing, but the headers above the titles fit our work perfectly and looked perfect, which helped the decision.

Incentivized

Good use cases for small/large teams

Incentivized

• Increased dev team efficiency through more streamlined development processes and task automation.
• Improved quality of software deployments due to better source control, automated testing, and release management options available in DevOps.
• Better collaboration between the dev team, business analysts, and agile project managers.

Incentivized

• Our team meetings are more direct and quick to get through thanks to the better visibility of the workload
• Easily being able to move cards between team lanes gives instant visibility to where the responsibility for the next step is needed.