Do you agree that products always have room for improvement?
"Every day there are little things in software that we find annoying. Some write books about it, like Annoyances.org, but I thought this site would be more constructive.
BetterSoftwareSuggestions.com is proudly maintained by myself and the developers at SSW."
- Adam Cogan Are you looking for SSW Rules on Azure DevOps?
We have Azure DevOps connected to Azure AD so that our users can log in with their Azure AD credentials.
Currently, DevOps does not show our users’ Display Name that is set in Azure AD.
Users can change their own name here, but this is not a fix. For the sake of consistency, display names should match the display names used in Azure AD.
When a new Product Owner is looking at an unfamiliar backlog, it would be handy to know the *active* developers.
I am thinking of a new tab “People”
Eg. Backlog | Analytics | People
If you like this idea, I’d love to know how to show the *active* developers. Maybe columns for:
And some Product Owners are active testers and maintain the backlog.
Maybe it would also be useful to give stats on the Product Owner too.
…and then you could compare with Product Owners on other projects.
I want to pass the filters for backlog…
1. How do I get the backlog URL right?
Suggestion: When I change the State, please update the URL
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: Bad example – 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 you go, proof… 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.
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:
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.
Dear Azure DevOps Product Planners,
A couple of projects were added today and I would love them to be sitting at the top. Alternatively give me a sort combo (see red box)
And since I have not opened them, I would like a red dot (like WeChat – the most popular app in China).
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:
Even better – replace the 3 choices with the text: “Put your 1st 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”
A couple of projects were added today and I would love them to be sitting at the top. Alternatively, give me a sort combo (see red box)
And since I have not opened them, I would like a red dot (like WeChat – the most popular app in China).
Figure: Allow me to sort these projects
Figure: WeChat UX uses red dots to indicate new things