Dear Work Item team,

Help me know there is an image in the Work Item.

When you get an email after an @mention – https://rules.ssw.com.au/when-you-use-@-mentions-in-a-pbi – we don’t know there is an image

Figure: I would not have guessed there was an image in the Work Item… Please improve the email to show the image or include some text “Image redacted – Click here”

Figure: There is the image

[Published on Adam’s Blog – Azure DevOps wishlist: auto-tagging Project Languages & Technologies]

When you’re working, you’re usually working on a single project, and Azure DevOps and Github are great to use. However, I often find myself needing to look across all the active projects that are going on in a company, and that is the stuff that’s hard to quickly see what they are. There are gaping holes to being able to see what the current projects are and what the tech inside them are. This post is about the tech we currently use, and what we’d like to see.

Going to a company and seeing the current projects and what tech is in them is not a particularly easy process – it’s a lot of manual work, and it’s easy to miss a couple.

Say your project is basically a Vue.js, .NET Core 2.1, Azure Logic Apps and Azure AKS. I think it would be wonderful to see that straight away in the tags.

Some NuGet packages are important. e.g. Entity Framework or Azure Table Storage. These tell you a bit about the project before you even have a look at it. An amazing feature would be to improve the Auto Tag feature (for both products). I also think showing these tags would be good advertising for Azure.

More info

For any project, we would like to know the Languages in use (e.g. C#, TypeScript, JavaScript) and Technologies in use (e.g. ASP.NET Core 2.2, Hangfire 1.6).

GitHub has Topics to represent Technologies. The Topics can come from the most popular Topics or can be custom, but they are not automatically added to the project.

Figure: The technologies are displayed, but are not automatically added

Azure DevOps has Languages and these are awesomely automatically added (see figure below). It also has Tags, and these can be used for Technologies, but this is completely manual and you can’t choose from a list of common Tags.

Figure: The Languages are added automatically and include percentage of usage. Tags can be added to represent Technologies

Ideally, we would like to see the best of both worlds as follows:

1. GitHub and Azure DevOps should work the same.
2. GitHub:
   1. Technologies and Languages should be auto-added based on the source code.
   2. We can also add them manually.
3. Azure DevOps:
   1. Technologies should be auto-added based on the source code (as is the case for Languages).
   2. We can also add them manually.
4. This information should be able to be analyzed across *all projects* for an organization.
   eg. A button “Analyze all projects” to the right of Languages / Tags (in the whitespace).

Wouldn’t it be awesome to use this for comparison across the organization.

PS: Maybe a future relation will be the Analytics Extension (when Code and Build is added) https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms.vss-analytics

Of course, if I got this granted, my next wish would be to be able to see bug regressions, number of deployments to staging, number of releases to production.

This project is empty other than a few commits.

I think the UI should:

#1 Let me know what stuff is empty

#2 Guide me to any new stuff. In this case since I I have not opened the commits, I would like a red dot (like WeChat – the most popular app in China).

Figure: Adding 2 red dots on the newly added commits by someone else, would encourage me to click on the only useful areas

Figure: WeChat UX uses red dots to indicate new things v2

Scenario:

I have a new project, I am a new user, I have not entered a comment.

I open this combo and nothing happens when I click on any of these 3 options.

It is weird for it to do nothing upon any selection.

Can you change it to show numbers like:

• All comments (0)
• Active (0)
• Hide (0)

Even better – replace the 3 choices with the text: “Put your 1^st comment on the code”

Figure: 3 useless combos that leave a new user bamboozled

Dear Product Planners,

I want to add a comment “You need to do smaller check-ins”… where do people put that today?

I’d like to see it on this commits right click menu.

Figure: Allow me to comment on the check-in size

More Info:

I’d love to know why I can *not* comment at the Commit level.

I should be able to say  “Where is the xxx file?” – basically a general comment on the overall commit. I can comment on each file, so why not on the commit?

Figure: After drilling in, there is no option in this “…” that says “Comment”