[WorldMaker]

AzDO is "decent", depending on your needs, but it's in an unfortunate zombie state where Microsoft is supporting it just enough to keep it stable and keep certain enterprises happy and consistently insisting that AzDO has a roadmap and is still beloved, but it is very clear that all of the actual resources are going to the GitHub side of the house in 2023.

(One of the most recent signs of this crazy zombie state that a recent feature for AzDO was given the absurd only Microsoft could do brand name "GitHub Advanced Secure for Azure DevOps", and it is indeed a bundle of GitHub features several years old at this point finally provided to AzDO users. Other signs include all sorts of AzDO libraries and roadmaps and related repos openly hosted on GitHub with last updated dates in 2019 and 2020.)

From an outsider perspective, Microsoft probably has a lot of sentimental and internal engineering reasons it doesn't want to truly wrap up so much of its operations in North Carolina (AzDO's ancestral home going back to early days of TFS), but the writing seems to be on the wall that what's left is a skeleton crew mostly working for GitHub full time and then sort of applying things part time back to AzDO. It doesn't seem to me to be sustainable long term, and every day it feels more like an Old Yeller situation where Microsoft is just prolonging the inevitable and making the pain worse for everyone involved.

[hotnfresh]

Ugh, they’re busy bringing bad project management to GitHub, in a quest to make it suck as much as all the others.

The old issues + tags + milestones was perfect. Now it’s the same needlessly-heavy thing as all the rest, with their reimagined “projects” thingy.

But then again I’ve not once seen a PM embrace any version of GitHub’s project management, with the only explanation forthcoming being “it’s confusing for non-technical users” (fucking how? More confusing than Jira or Asana? No friggin’ way) so maybe they have to shit it up and make it hard to use and easy to get lost in or miss info in, to get any traction with PMs.

[WorldMaker]

It does seem a case where Microsoft dogfooding GitHub may be actively making it worse. They've done several BUILD and GitHub Universe videos "How Microsoft Uses GitHub to Build [X]" and their PMs certainly need all those complex features to track stuff and those videos are the closest to training materials on how to use some of it, and it is definitely a lot going on.

It definitely seems one of those sorts of "every system PMs touch is doomed to become unmanageable complexity" laws and GitHub "Projects" does seem to be exponentially closer to being "Jira 2: Electric Boogaloo" every day.

[gabereiser]

This. AzDO will die. It will be replaced entirely by Github. It originally was only designed as a way to get people onto Azure using their already-existing MS partnership to give it away for free. The only purpose, drive adoption of Azure Cloud. In runners, resources, stickiness, and preventing abandoning ship.

[rhaway84773]

Azure Devops existed well before GitHub was owned by MS under Visual Studio Online moniker.

It was intended to be a SAAS version of the on Prem offerings MS has provided since before GitHub even existed.

[gabereiser]

I know it’s history and I know it’s future.