To me, source control of your code not only protects your source but helps control changes to that source, but this truly fails in comparison to the business process management that helps define these changes before they happen. Azure Boards is the place you plan and track your project deliverables. Azure Boards provides the following:
- Boards: The flow of work for the team
- Work Items: Items to be completed by an individual
- Backlogs: Plan, organize, and prioritize work for the team
- Sprints: Time frame to complete work
- Queries: Filter criteria for work items or bulk updating
- Plans: A way to review deliverables
These are shown here in the following figure:
All of the these are visualized within Azure Boards, which then leads us to how do we manage the code changes. Azure Repos provides code repositories to store source code and name the changes/version of that source code. These to me are the biggest features within Azure DevOps, as they are designed to protect the code and the meeting of the business process. Building a backlog and mapping out tasks helps everyone understand the deliverables and tasks being completed to meet those deliverables and then protect the code behind those deliverables. Now, this book holistically isn't about requirement gathering and project makeup. I wanted to take some time to review these events as I believe they are just as important as building the solutions. With this, let's talk about some things that will impact our development of the solution in Azure—protecting our source code. Let's look at a simplified flow the process code should take, shown here in the following diagram:
I prefer Git and the GitFlow process for my repository, as the pull request or PR process allows for better code review of changes being checked in the main branch. Now, branching structures can be a religious battle, but I prefer to keep it simple with the main and release strategy GitFlow offers out of the box. Even as a single developer model, I use this as it helps me keep myself honest. Let's take a quick look at how this plays out for the development process. The following diagram shows the pieces that are in play:
Learn more about Azure Boards at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/devops/boards/.