10 Azure DevOps Best Practices

10 Azure DevOps Best Practices 

When adopting Azure DevOps, the following key best practices can significantly enhance efficiency, reliability, and security. 

1. Effective sprint planning 

• Before: Plan your sprints effectively in Azure DevOps with well-maintained product backlogs in Azure Boards. There, items are prioritised, clearly described, and estimated before the planning session.  
• During: During the meeting, pull work in priority order, confirm each item has a clear definition of done, assign owners, and check team capacity using Azure Boards’ capacity planning tools to prevent overcommitment. Link all work items to commits, pull requests, and builds, so progress is easy to track.  
• After: At the end of the sprint, review Azure DevOps sprint reports to evaluate completed work, identify carry-overs, and agree on improvements for the next cycle. 

2. Use small, frequent deployments 

The next best practice is to use small, frequent deployments. Shipping smaller changes more often reduces risk and makes it easier to detect and fix issues quickly. Additionally, it enables faster feedback loops and more agile development cycles. 

3. Implement Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) 

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) in Azure DevOps means using Azure Pipelines to automate the build, test and deploy process for every code change. 

• CI: With continuous integration (CI) each commit triggers automated builds and tests so you can catch issues early in development.  
• CD: Continuous delivery extends this by pushing changes to staging or production environments once they pass the defined quality gates. Security scans and quality checks should be embedded in the pipeline and pipeline definitions should be stored in YAML so you can version, reuse and be consistent across projects. 

4. Automate everything 

Automation reduces manual errors, speeds up delivery and ensures consistency. From build, test, to deployment and infrastructure provisioning, automate wherever possible. Use pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (IaC). 

5. Implement branch policies & pull requests 

Implement branch policies and pull requests. Enforcing policies such as code reviews and successful builds ensures that only high-quality code is committed to your main branch. Pull requests foster collaboration and code quality. 

6. Secure secrets properly 

When it comes to securing Azure DevOps, never hardcode credentials or API keys. Instead, secure and manage your secrets properly in secure solutions such as Azure Key Vault. This keeps sensitive information safe and reduces the attack surface. 

7. Monitor and iterate continuously 

Lastly, always monitor and iterate. Monitoring your cloud applications and infrastructure helps you detect issues early – before they turn into problems. Therefore, use logs, metrics, and set up alerts to continually improve your processes based on feedback and observed behaviour. 

8. Integrate Azure DevOps with Microsoft Entra ID 

Don’t add users manually in Azure DevOps. Instead, integrate it with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory). This way, you can manage users and permissions in one place, control authentication (who you are) and authorisation (what you can do) centrally, and use Entra ID groups for role assignments. 

9. Use a consistent tagging system 

Apply a clear and consistent tagging system to work items, commits, and builds in Azure DevOps. Having a strategic tagging system in place significantly improves resource management.  

With tags, you can filter, search and report more easily on related work across sprints and projects. Use tags to track features, components, requests or priority levels. 

Keep tag names short and standardised, so the team uses them consistently, and review tags periodically to remove duplicates or unused ones. 

10. Prioritise quality over quantity 

In Azure DevOps, prioritise delivering high-quality work items over pushing a high volume of changes.  

• Use code reviews, automated testing and static analysis to validate each change before it’s merged.  
• Keep backlog items small enough to be delivered in a sprint but big enough to be complete. 
• Don’t rush work into production just to meet a quota; a smaller number of thoroughly tested, well-built features will give you more long-term value than a larger number of rushed, unstable changes.