Top Three Essential Features coming into Azure DevOps during Q1 2023

This is the whole list of features and fixes planned for Azure DevOps during Q1 2023. There are lot of great things like swimlane colors, swimlane rules and support for pause/resume in manual testing. As we can see from the list below, there is quite a massive set of features and fixes. Let me highlight the three most important ones and explain why I believe they are the most significant.

This list is copied from the Azure DevOps Roadmap | Microsoft Learn website.

Feature	Area
Swimlane colors	Boards
Save comment improvements	Boards
Prevent picklist fields from being edited	Boards
REST APIs to connect GitHub Repos to Azure Boards (Preview)	Boards
Swimlane rules on Kanban board	Boards
Track repo cloning	Repos
In-product recommendations for secure settings	Pipelines
Checks scalability	Pipelines
.NET 6 agent to replace .NET Core 3.1 agent	Pipelines
Ability to run tasks on next available Node version, if targeted version is not available	Pipelines
All in-the-box tasks run on Node 16	Pipelines
Removal of Node 6 and 10 from Microsoft hosted pools	Pipelines
Sort test plans by any column	Test Plans
Improved support for code coverage publishing within Azure Pipelines	Test Plans
Pause and resume manual test execution	Test Plans
Support for Cargo package manager for Rust	Artifacts
Organization profile image	General
Support Azure Managed Identities and Service Principals (Preview)	General
Pull Request widget to allow for the selection of many repos	Reporting
Dashboards, last accessed and modified	Reporting

Save Comment Improvements

This is a feature that is actually already implemented and published. As of now, you don’t have to save the whole work item when you want to add a comment. You can click save near the comment section and the comment will be added. As previously you would need to click the top save button to save the whole work item when you added new comment. This is small, but great improvement into daily usage and that’s why I picked it into my list.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/release-notes/roadmap/2022/save-comment-improvements

Managed Identities and Service Principal support

As of today, almost every application integration scenario relies on Personal Access Tokens (PATs) to integrate with Azure DevOps. PATs are easy to create and maintain, but they have some major downsides. They can be leaked, which potentially enables a malicious actor to access Azure DevOps organization features without AD security features like Conditional Access Policies. In the near future, we should be able to use managed identities and service principals when integrating with Azure DevOps using REST APIs or client libraries. This greatly improves security over PAT tokens and removes the annoying issue of, “Who created this PAT and why has it expired now?”

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/release-notes/roadmap/support-azure-managed-identities

Track repo cloning

This is another DevSecOps feature that I’m looking for. Currently we don’t know who has cloned the Azure DevOps repository and when. There is no hook or audit log when repository is cloned. when this feature is finished, we hopefully have both and we can integrate our Azure DevOps repository cloning events into SIEM products like Azure Sentinel.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/release-notes/roadmap/track-repo-cloning