Let’s begin by getting access to azure DevOps. There are two ways you can have it. The preferred way is to sign up with azure DevOps service hosted by Microsoft so you don’t have to worry about installing and maintaining azure devops server. The second way? you guess it right you will have to install Azure DevOps server yourself.
To sign up azure devops service Go to https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vso
Click Get Azure DevOps free
You will see Microsoft sign in windows
You can enter your email address, phone number, or Skype ID. I will use the email option for this demo. If you have MSDN subscription then, use the Microsoft account associated with your MSDN subscription because you get more features such as Test Plans, Azure Artifacts, Azure Pipelines depending on your visual studio subscription level. It will also help later to link your azure subscription with you Azure DevOps account.
Select Next.
Agree term and conditions and click continue to Get started with Azure DevOps
You can now create your first project
You can give your project a name and decide your version control and process template option. Please make sure you get it right first time specially the process template as you won’t be able to change it later. but you can customize each template to suite your needs (more on this later) You have four templates to chose from. This will impact mainly your work management process and reporting. If you do scrum chose scrum. If you don’t use scrum approach but still work on agile way such as Kanban then Agile template is probably better fit. If you are just starting and want to keep things simple then Microsoft has recently added a basic option. CMMI is better fit for those companies that are implementing CMMI process or seeking CMMI certifications its also good fit if you are still on use waterfall approach (for whatever reason). Ok, enough talk, lets get going and hit that button.
And Voila you have access to Azure DevOps. You have created fully functional azure DevOps project.
Big collection of tooling waiting for your commands. But wait, you are kind of lonely here, you need to work with your team, right? So next step is to give access to other people to your azure DevOps organization.
Click on Organization settings> Users
and under manage users click on button with this plus Icon. Add new users’
Just fill this little form
For users, Enter their email address. If your organization have office 365 Azure Active Directory then you can use your office 365 accounts otherwise enter personal email address. If user don’t have Microsoft account ask them to create one. You can add several email addresses by separating them with a semicolon (;).
For Access level: Basic level is required to contribute to the code base. You can also select stakeholders which is free license that gives user limited access I.e. the backlogs and boards and dashboards. I will recommend to add every body outside development team to give stakeholder access and if anyone need access to more features you can always change the access level.
You can optionally select Add theses to projects. Place your cursor in the project box, and then select a project from the resulting list.
For DevOps Groups Leave as Project Contributors, unless you want to give users admin or read only access.
After you add users, they will get email like below. All they need to do is to click “Join Now button” and they are in.
Want to see all of this in action? Here is the demo I have recorded for you.
DevOps With Microsoft 