Continuous Delivery Using Azure DevOps Services

Azure DevOps provides a set of cloud-hosted tools that software teams can use as an end-to-end solution to plan, develop, test, and deliver value in the form of working software. This two-day course provides students with the DevOps principles and related hands-on practices, using Azure DevOps Services, to work better as a team, scale their agility, share and integrate their work, and deliver working software continuously in order to enable faster delivery of value and receive early and valuable feedback.

Who should take this class?
This course is intended for experienced software development professionals who want to learn about DevOps in order to achieve Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Feedback, and Continuous Learning in a technical value stream as supported by Azure DevOps Services, Visual Studio, and Azure in order to continually deliver working software at scale.

Benefits

This course provide several learning objectives and benefits.

Describe DevOps principles, benefits, and related practices
Explain the Three Ways: flow, feedback, and learning
Work as a team and increase flow in Azure DevOps
Identify, minimize, and eliminate dependencies
Plan work at scale: epics, features, user stories
Use Azure Boards to plan and execute a Sprint
Create, visualize, and follow a Definition of Done
Report data via queries, charts, and widgets
Use the Analytics service, dashboards, and widgets
Explore Git version control primer and workflows
Learn branching strategies and potential side effects
Visualize and manage code dependencies
Adopt an internal open source model
Setup automated testing in Azure Pipelines
Create and customize YAML-based pipelines
Collect code coverage information
Use Test Impact Analysis to improve performance
Practice Continuous Integration (CI) and CI+
Deploy code using Azure Pipelines
Describe Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Deploy code to Microsoft Azure
Practice Continuous Delivery (CD) and using triggers
Use feature flags to manage feature availability
Configure and use Application Insights for telemetry
Use feature flags to support Hypothesis-Driven Development (HDD) and A/B testing
Practice exploratory testing and take testing “tours”
Use the Microsoft Test and Feedback extension
Understand, identify, and avoid technical debt
Use SonarCloud to inspect and visualize technical debt
Build feedback directly into the product
Build a culture of learning and improvement
Track improvement through agile metrics

Outline

1: Increasing Flow at Scale

The complexity of software development
The need for empirical process control
Increasing flow through a technical value stream
Professional Scrum
The Nexus scaled Scrum framework
Practices for organizing teams
Establishing feature teams to minimize dependencies

2: Planning and Executing at Scale

Organizing and refining the Product Backlog
Creating a definition of “ready”
Dependencies, types, and related risks
Cross-team refinement to identify dependencies
Planning and executing a Sprint
Limiting work in progress (WIP)
Working in small batches
Creating and obeying a Definition of Done
Using queries, charts, and dashboards for reporting

3: Sharing Code

Working collaboratively as a team
Collective ownership mindset
Git version control workflow (optional)
Branching strategies and related side effects
Using Code Maps to visualize code dependencies
Using Package Management to share binaries
Practicing internal open source (inner source)

4: Integrating Continuously

Why and how to create fast feedback loops
The importance of automated testing
Unit testing in Visual Studio
Automated builds in Azure Pipelines
Creating and customizing YAML-based builds
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Running tests during an automated build
Code coverage and regression testing
Configuring and using Test Impact Analysis
Practicing Continuous Integration (CI) and CI+

5: Delivering Continuously

Azure Pipelines deployment
Release definitions, stages, and releases
Deployment targets, IaaS, PaaS, containers
Using Microsoft Azure for DevOps
Configuring service connections
Automated deployment to an Azure App Service
Release jobs, steps, and tasks
Creating and deploying a release
Release and stage triggers
Practicing Continuous Delivery (CD)

6: Empowering the Product Owner

Build-Measure-Learn explained
Hypothesis-Driven Development (HDD)
Customizing Azure DevOps to implement HDD
Feature flags overview
Using LaunchDarkly to manage feature flags
Telemetry and application performance management
Using Application Insights to gather telemetry
A/B testing explained
Using feature flags to support A/B testing
Exploratory testing and taking testing “tours”
Using the Microsoft Test and Feedback extension
Understanding and identifying technical debt
Using SonarCloud to gauge your technical debt
Making technical debt transparent
Practices for paying off technical debt

7: Learning and Improving Continuously

Working and learning as a team
Patterns of effective collaboration
Pairing, swarming, and mobbing practices
Building a culture of learning and improvement
Blameless retrospectives
Building feedback directly into the product
Communities of Practice (COPs)
Tracking improvement through agile metrics
Using the wiki to build tribal knowledge

Required Prerequisites

Attendees should be familiar with software development, Visual Studio, and Scrum. Attendees should also have basic experience with Azure DevOps Services or Azure DevOps Server.