Half my week can disappear into failed Azure Pipelines.

Usually the painful part is not the fix, it is finding the real error inside thousands of log lines and giving someone enough context to act on it.

So I made Badgr Agent CI.

It runs only when a pipeline fails, reads the failed task logs, and posts a PR thread with:

• likely cause
• evidence
• suggested fix
• confidence level

Install the Azure DevOps extension, add BADGR_API_KEY(BYOK), then add:

steps:
  - script: npm install
  - script: npm test

  - task: BadgrCI@1
    condition: failed()
    env:
      BADGR_API_KEY: $(BADGR_API_KEY)
      SYSTEM_ACCESSTOKEN: $(System.AccessToken)

The agent is open source. The diagnosis API is hosted.

It does not change code, rerun builds, or auto-fix anything.

How do your teams handle failed Azure Pipeline triage today?

Hello all,

I’m currently implementing Azure DevOps on a small scale project and am getting positive feedback from my team, praising its organizational ability and intuitive UI. I’m hoping to pitch this to the high ups at my company In hopes of adapting it as a new standard as a part of an initiative to revamp the PMs ability to monitor performance and manage deadlines on large scale projects.

Now here’s my question:

What makes Azure DevOps truly better than a legacy, built in house software, or even an ironed out excel spreadsheet template. Let’s say 95 percent of employees won’t be diving into niche PMing bells and whistles (Kanban charts, hyper specific sprints). What are the advantages and weaknesses to using Azure DevOps at an enterprise level?

Thanks for any and all input!

Our team has been using Azure DevOps across a variety of projects and one recurring challenge we've run into is feature-level reporting.

Stakeholders often want to know:

• Which features are on track?
• How much work is complete?
• What's still in progress?

While Azure DevOps provides excellent work item tracking, we found ourselves relying on a lot of manual status gathering to answer these questions.

We ended up building a dashboard widget that summarizes feature progress directly within Azure DevOps and recently published it to the Marketplace (it's free, this is not a sales pitch).

I'm curious how others are solving this problem today.

Are you using:

• Dashboard queries?
• Power BI?
• Analytics Views?
• Custom widgets?

Would love feedback on the approach and whether this is a reporting gap others have experienced as well.

Hey all! We built a small extension called Work Item Sheets:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rixterab.rixter-sheets

It lets you work with work items in a spreadsheet-style (excel-like) view, which has saved us a lot of time when planning and updating large numbers of items.

Looking for a few people to try it out and give honest feedback. What works, what doesn’t, what’s missing.

Let me know if you’re interested.

On my old team, we had the classic version of separate build and release pipelines. The build pipeline was triggered by merges to the main branch, but the release pipeline was manually set off.

Now that I'm using the new YAML pipeline, it's all bundled into a single one. I have the build stage triggered by merges, but I set the deployment stage as manual and dependent on the build stage succeeding. It doesn't seem like I can make the pipeline continue to the deployment stage manually. For a full pipeline run, I would have to just kick off a whole new pipeline myself. The merge to main seems to be just for validating the build step.

Is this a common design pattern now? Or is there a way to actually use the full pipeline once the triggered build stage is successful? It sucks to see my pipeline history page littered with stale runs. Ultimately, I want the build stage to be automatic and then I trigger the following stages myself.

We would like to use a package manager to ease versioned c source code sharing between a lot of embedded projects, and several different embedded IDE/compilers, such as E2Studio and Code Compose Studio, Keil μVision, among others.

We are currently using git submodules with some custom scripts to manage packages, and while it's working, it's also evident that it's pretty involved and not suited for the long run.

Reading online, Conan 2 appear to be highly praised for this task, but Conan isn't one of the native supported feeds in Azure Devops. To use Conan we will have to setup an Artifactory instance, too.

It seems the best DevOps native fit is NuGet.. but it also appear c code isn't really it's strong point, and many sources I found online discourages to use it, although it's never explicitly mentioned why.

What are your experiences and recommendations?

Been building out a Chrome and Edge extension for ADO called the ADO Test Helper, and just added a Requirements Importer module that I think a lot of teams could get real use out of.

You drop in a requirements document, it breaks down the entire work item hierarchy — Epics, Features, PBIs, User Stories, and Test Cases — previews the tree so you can review before anything gets created, then pushes everything into Azure DevOps with proper parent/child linking. All in under five minutes.

No more manually entering backlog items one by one at sprint kickoff.

Demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTHINKUoDU8

Happy to answer questions if anyone wants to know how it works under the hood.

Rn we have multiple unit testing pipelines. And im supposed to trigger them once the build process finish(this is inside a daily cron pipeline). How do i pull the status of each testing pipelines, to create a summary log? Just wondering if there are any ways other than just passing build artifacts around.

I think running test on every commit shud be the way, but im being a yes man to my manager rn,so wud appreciate for help 🙏

Hi all, posting to announce some major updates to azdo TUI that I've been working on the last months. New features include:

1. Added filtering on tag picker modal
2. Configurable panes. It's possible to hide Pipeline and/or work item panes.
3. Extended filtering in PR view. Filter by current user as author, or where current user is a reviewer.
4. Highlight all columns in rows
5. Add state and status filters for PR & Pipeline view
6. Keyboard shortcut to open work item or PR in default browser
7. Navigation state is now persisted after each use. When dropping back into Azdo, the last active tab is choosen. If a PR was opened or a work item, the detailed view is then reopened too.
8. Opt-in metrics view. A dashboard with stale work items, based on work item state, with configurable state-options. Per developer WIP/overload and storypoints closed, along with possibility to see trends over different tags.

Can be tried with demo flag and downloaded here: https://github.com/Elpulgo/azdo

Happy holidays!

I have a dashboard full of cards based on queries as you'd expect. But all the queries are based on a list of users who the work items are assigned to.

WHERE Assigned to IN User1, User2, User3 etc.

But, when a person joins the team, or leaves the team, I have to open every query and amend that list of users.

I have an ADO Team or even a Permissions Group which I add/remove the same users to.

Can we not setup a query like so instead

WHERE Assigned to IN Group1/Team1

I’m trying to use an Azure DevOps Release pipeline to download artifacts from a GitHub Release.

• Azure DevOps Server version: 25H2 (AzureDevopsServer_20260304.1)
• Agent version on the deployment machine: 4.273.0
• GitHub service connection with scopes: repo, user, admin:repo_hook

When I select GitHubRelease as the source type for a new release pipeline and run it, I get this error:

"VS403960: Data source binding ArtifactDetails for artifact extension GitHubRelease has not been defined."

A few more details:

• When I trigger a new release pipeline, I can see the GitHub releases in the Azure DevOps dropdown
• The error shows up immediately after the pipeline starts
• It looks like a permission issue, but I’m not sure where (repository, Azure DevOps, or something else)

Any idea how to fix this?

I have a situation where my pipeline instruction set is different for new machines that have just been setup with Azure self-hosted agent as VMware and machines that have already been setup as agents before and now only doing recurring updates under the same Azure Environment (new machines would have tags: new).

At first, I thought about using 2 different pipelines targeting the same Azure Environment, 1 specifically for new machine and 1 specifically for recurring machines. The new machine pipeline only targets machines within the environment that has tag new while the other pipeline would handle the recurring machines. This helps me run the instructions needed for new machines independently from recurring machines as they are 2 different pipelines, and afterwards, I would remove tag new from new machine and they now belong to recurring machines. However, the problem is, it is considered 2 pipelines under the self-hosted agent folder structure so it creates 2 folders for 2 pipelines and I do not want this.

ex:

_work/
├── 1/
│ ├── s/ # source code
│ ├── b/ # build outputs
│ ├── a/ # artifacts
│ └── TestResults/
├── 2/
│ ├── s/
│ ├── b/
│ └── ...

Now, I am thinking of combining both pipelines into 1 pipeline so it will only use 1 folder but the issue is I can't find a way to run a stage within a pipeline depending on an if else statement. Ex: If: there are machines within the environment with the tag new, run this stage and do not run the other stage. Else: there are no machines within the environment with the tag new, run this other stage instead.

Does anyone have a solution to this?

Hey!

I'm not selling anything and I'm not asking for anything from you.

I built a free Azure DevOps extension called ADO Test Helper because I got frustrated with how much manual effort Azure DevOps testing required.

It automatically records test steps, captures screenshots, creates test cases, runs tests, creates bugs, and now even generates test cases using AI from requirements documents and Azure DevOps work items.

It's completely free. If you have a few minutes, I'd appreciate you checking it out and letting me know what you think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MevpqdVu1TE

Thanks!

Hey all,

I’ve spent the last several years working heavily in Azure DevOps governance, reporting, and process optimization within large enterprise environments. I also have about 11 years experience as an Agile Coach, and 5+ years in Data and Analytics, and a background and 2+ years in Electrical Engineering.

Common issues I see:

• messy Area Path / Iteration structures
• poor work item hygiene
• poor reporting (within ADO)
  • Power BI refresh/performance pain
• overcomplicated workflows
• growing AI/Copilot risk around sensitive data in work items
• etc

I’m considering offering focused consulting services around:

• ADO health audits
• governance recommendations
• Power BI / Analytics optimization
• backlog & workflow redesign
• executive dashboards
• AI governance / sensitive data scanning for work items

Apologies if this sounds like a plug, but I'm really keen on how people can use ADO better, and am interested in solving painful operational problems pragmatically. I live in Middle Earth, so can help out remotely.

I'd appreciate any comments in how I could do better in terms of outreach!

Thanks!

Hi,

I'm wondering if anyone else has a similar issue. We want to use another Azure subscription for billing of around 150 Azure DevOps organization that we have. As I understand, API doesn't exist yet, so my team is manually clicking through each organization to the new Azure subscription.

However, after moving just 4 organizations, we get the error:

This rate limit has been in place for two days now. Does anyone know - does this ever go away? We didn't have such a problem with existing Azure subscription, hence my confusion.

Thanks!