The Azure DevOps team has been hard at work this holiday season, delivering a range of innovative features to enhance your development workflow. Here are the top five highlights from the recent updates.
Run Children Stages When Parent Stage Fails
Previously, if a parent stage failed in a pipeline, its child stages were skipped. With this update, child stages can now be configured to execute even when their parent stage fails. This allows for more comprehensive post-failure actions, such as cleanup or notifications, ensuring your pipelines handle failures more gracefully.
Support for Mermaid Diagrams in Markdown File Preview
Diagramming and documentation are vital parts of productivity and traceability, but creating these items costs time. Mermaid diagrams are visual diagrams that are generated using text in a simple syntax similar to Markdown. These diagrams can take the form of flow charts, Gannt charts, UML diagrams, and more. Azure Repos now renders Mermaid syntax within markdown files as diagrams in file previews and pull requests. This enhancement provides clearer visuals for documentation, improving readability and collaboration among team members.
Auto Pause for Test Case Run
When testing manually, testers can run into the challenge of losing work if they do not mark the run as “Paused” before saving and closing. Not only is the work lost, the tester must start all over on a potentially complex case. Now, Test Plans is introducing a feature that will auto pause a test case run. This will ensure all data is saved without the need for a manual pause, and testers can resume their work where they left off. This feature is currently in preview – email the team if you’d like to join.
Commit-Less Builds Supported for Dependency Scanning
Azure DevOps now supports commit-less builds for dependency scanning. This means that dependency scanning no longer requires a new commit to trigger; all builds will be subject to vulnerability analysis. Therefore, with this update, security workflows are streamlined and strengthened, making your code safer and more robust.
macOS-15 Sequoia Image Available
With the inception of dozens of new operating systems annually, it is important to be able to build, run, and test your application in as many as possible to ensure a good experience for your end user. Azure Pipelines introduced the macOS-15 Sequoia image in preview for hosted agents. To make use of this image, simply edit your YAML file to include vmImage: 'macOS-15'.
Whether through improved workflows or enhanced scanning capabilities, these features help teams stay ahead and continue improving in a dynamic development environment.
For more information, feel free to contact our team of experts here at PRAKTIK.