Series Introduction
Welcome to a new series of short articles I am presenting about DevOps, specifically in the Azure DevOPs stack. The objective is that you will learn about an Azure-based DevOPs service in no more than one minute and thus, quickly get familiar with the entire stack over a short period of time. These are going short, easily digestible articles; so let's get started
Plans, Artifacts and Extensions...
The One Minute DevOps - Part 2
In the previous article, we had a walkthrough on Introduction to Azure DevOps and a few of its components Board, Repos, and Pipelines.
Let's discuss a few more components of Azure DevOps.
Azure DevOps Test Plans
Azure Test Plans are a browser-based component of Azure DevOps. You can think of them as a management solution for manual and automated testing, as well as perform user testing and collect feedback from users. It is a mechanism that provides continuous integration with the deployment pipeline to build, test, and deployment of an application to any platform and cloud. Basic users do not have permission to create Test Plans.
Azure Artifacts
An artifact is a service that helps you to manage dependencies in your codebase, for example external libraries and packages you might use. Artifacts is a package management solution that helps reduce the complexity of hosting and sharing packages with teams of any size. Code can be shared across the teams and packages like npm, Gradle, NuGet, Marven, etc. can be managed from one central point. This greatly reduces the possibility of errors in a production pipieline with many contributors.
Azure Extension Marketplace
The Extensions marketplace is a one stop shop for hundreds of extensions that are available and can be installed which can be shared among the team members. It gives a range of add-on apps and services that can be integrated with the DevOps environment and these services can add value to areas such as the build, test, collaboration of software development. It is worth checking out to see if there is something there that can assist you streamline and improve your process, because after all, thats what DevOPs is all about!