Many organizations are using Scaled Agile Frameworks to coordinate work across projects and teams. The need for organizations to view and track progress of their Agile teams across the portfolio has made many organizations turn to Scaled Agile Framework. While Azure DevOps is a really fantastic part of any DevOps tool chain, there is no out of the box process that supports SAFe. You need customization on all levels (organization, projects, teams, boards etc.) to map the concepts of SAFe into Azure DevOps.
If you are looking for a guidance on using Azure DevOps as a tool behind your Scaled Agile implementation, this article could provide you the guidance to get started.
For this setup, I'll be using the users from an active directory in Azure to connect to Azure DevOps. If you don't have an Azure DevOps account or Azure portal subscription, you can create a free account here and here. We'll be adding users to our Azure DevOps organization from an Active Directory in Azure. If your users are managed in an on-prem active directory, you can sync up the users to Cloud AD using one of the methods mentioned in this documentation.
Once you've created the Azure DevOps account and have the users in Azure AD, we can start creating and setting up an organization in Azure DevOps.
You can create a new Organization in Azure DevOps by providing a unique organization name and a location where you want your projects to be hosted.
Skip the project creation part and proceed to Organization Settings. We'll start by linking our Azure Active directory to the organization. On the left menu under Organization Settings you can see the options for Azure Active Directory. Connect the Azure AD to the organization by providing the Active Directory Tenant ID and click Connect.
Now you can add the users from your Active Directory in Azure to Azure DevOps organization. For the free version, we can have upto 5 basic users added.
If you want to add more users, then you need to pay for the Azure DevOps licenses. If you want the billing to be applied to your cloud subscription, then you can setup this from the Billing menu item on your Organization settings.
Next we'll see how to add a custom process template for SAFe and work with additional work item types like Bushiness Initiatives, Spikes etc.
Comments