[WorldMaker]

Microsoft's "on the record" voice is always "Azure DevOps is alive and has an active roadmap".

You can read that roadmap for yourself. It is kept in a GitHub repository. Last time I checked this year the last commit was sometime in 2020. The last group of features that loudly launched for Azure DevOps were branded "GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps". (This is where I get the 2-3 years behind GitHub metric.) Microsoft's actions seem to be speaking a lot louder than their "on the record" words.

I've heard from multiple "off the record" sources who are entirely hearsay and I cannot name names that "Yes, of course Azure DevOps is dead."

The best, I can say, as mostly an outsider is that Azure DevOps is at least "undead" and definitely in some sort of zombie state. I've got an unsubstantiated feeling, again as mostly an outsider, that Microsoft is somehow superstitious about Azure DevOps' home office (Microsoft office in North Carolina was founded out of Microsoft's source control dreams) and is afraid to kill it.

[DaiPlusPlus]

I used to work at Microsoft, though I left a few years before MS purchased GitHub. Post-2010s, Microsoft was still migrating many products away from Perforce/SourceDepot and into TFS, and then TFS+git around ~2015. Microsoft hacked TFS to be a git server so they could continue to use TFS for work-item/project-tracking (and no-one wanted to go back to Product Studio). That’s TFS’ strength, as far as Microsoft is concerned, because git hosting is a trivially fungible feature here - whereas GitHub’s Issues only works well for small teams and really doesn’t scale to projects on the scale of Windows or Office.

…but I’ve noticed that GitHub’s recently (since 2020?) has really being fleshing-out their Projects/Issues - it’s not quite as flexible as TFS/AzDO’s Work-Items but on-track to reach parity in a few more years, I reckon.

So that’s my pet-theory: eventually GitHub (and GitHub Enterprise) will reach “good-enough” parity with AzDO for Issues/Work-Items/Project management - and as soon as that happens I fully expect AzDO to die an unceremonious death (because MS doesn’t want to spook the many Enterprise(TM) customers who still bankroll it). We may-or-may-not see some improvement in AzDO-to-GitHub migration tooling, as that that comes down to what side of the bed the Director of the ALM team woke up on that morning.

[WorldMaker]

Yeah, GitHub Projects/Issues have picked up a lot of "features" that only a (Microsoft) PM could love. Many of them don't even light up unless you are in a paid organization (or GitHub Enterprise) (not just a paid account, but a paid organization) so probably a lot of GitHub users probably don't even realize how much GitHub now has feature "parity" with Jira or AzDO. (Nor how quickly that has happened.)

I'm mostly aware of it from GitHub Universe and Microsoft BUILD demonstration videos. Both of which give me a lot of signals that Microsoft internally has moved a lot faster to GitHub than it did from predecessors to TFS/TFS+git. Some of the teams talking about it are huge ones (both in terms of size but also in terms of weight internal/external to the company).

From their own hype videos in the virtual sides of the two conferences, I certainly get the impression they reached "good enough" feature "parity" with AzDO Work Items internally a year or two ago, at least. That doesn't seem like the reason they keep saying AzDO is still alive.

I do realize that AzDO has some big enough Enterprise customers though that not spooking them can be a big reason for the weird messaging despite their overt actions and all the subtle hints that AzDO is dead. But also, my understanding is that many of those customers don't entirely care if a migration needs to happen so long as they are given a migration with a far enough out deadline. [1] I know some companies seem to be acting more spooked that there isn't a deadline yet for AzDO's shutdown. (It was a factor in my last employer migrating to Atlassian's terrible products for everything but repository hosting after years in AzDO [after years in Bitbucket and Atlassian's terrible products and hating them; vicious cycle].)

I obviously don't know what Microsoft is truly waiting for at this point to kill AzDO, which gets back to that feeling that it is something fundamentally weirder such as a superstition.

[1] Case in point: no one seems to be shouting too much about the crazy Azure AD to Entra shenanigans because it has dates and timelines! The timelines don't even make sense: among other things, Azure AD B2B and Azure AD B2C both get marketed as "deprecated" months before their Entra counterparts are expected to leave "Beta" or "Preview" statuses and even more months before automated migration tools are expected to be available. But it is all a planned migration and that makes all the difference.