This article was originally written by Avanade alum Adam Cartwright.

In exclusive Avanade research, nearly 90% of senior IT decision makers say that modern software engineering is crucial to addressing the needs of digital business. If you’re not already using a modern engineering platform to boost response times and quality, speed time to market and minimize risk and disruption, why not? And if you are: Are you sure that you’ve optimized these benefits and maximized your ROI with the best end-to-end support for the development lifecycle?

Whether you’re already using a modern engineering platform or just getting started, now’s a great time to confirm that you’re giving your developers the five primary services that every DevOps team needs. These are services that Avanade’s own expert engineers use to build, test and deploy award-winning solutions for our clients. They’re services that we use together with our clients to drive high-velocity and high-quality results. And they’re services that our clients continue to use to gain these benefits for the foreseeable future.

Given Avanade’s market-leading expertise in the Microsoft platform—we’re the only solution provider to earn the Microsoft Alliance SI Partner of the Year Award for 11 consecutive years—it won’t be a surprise that we’ve found ways to exploit Azure DevOps for even greater performance, speed, and quality. Our Modern Engineering Platform accelerators, templates and other IP speed the time to provision and configure these Azure DevOps services so teams—yours, ours, or our combined teams—can be immediately effective with Azure DevOps.

How much of a difference can Avanade expertise and IP combined with Azure DevOps make in your modern software engineering efforts? For example, we helped an integrated international energy company with a large trading unit to:

• Increase its trading volume by 33%
• Reduce priority incidents by 75%
• Speed provisioning of infrastructure by 95%
• Reduce test-cycle time by 86%

Here’s your checklist for the five primary services that every DevOps team needs:

1. Scrum management—The ability to plan, track and discuss work across your teams is essential to maintaining both speed and quality. Your DevOps team should be able to track work with Kanban boards, backlogs, team dashboards and custom reporting that provides high-value insight into the health and status of your project.
2. Source code management—Your DevOps team should have access to Git-based source control with the flexibility to support any Git client, IDE or editor, and the ability to scale to support any Git repository. The right tool performs highly effective Git code reviews, automates pull requests and protects code quality with branch policies.
3. Package management—With a scalable artifact management system, your developers can create, host and share code efficiently across the enterprise; manage all package types, such as Maven, npm and NuGet packages from both public and private sources; protect packages from deletion or alteration; and add packages to any pipeline.
4. CI/CD orchestration— For greater flexibility, your comprehensive platform should include the ability to build and deploy pipelines that work with any language, platform and cloud. Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines should also automate your developers’ builds and deployments so they spend less time managing nuts and bolts and more time being creative.
5. Test and quality management—Your test tools should include automated and manual testing, test plan management, the ability to extend tests across the desktop and web, and end-to-end traceability that captures rich scenario data so discovered defects become actionable.

If you don’t score a five out of five on this checklist, don’t fret. It’s never been easier to get all these tools and get them working seamlessly together, thanks to the new Azure DevOps service from Microsoft. It’s a powerful, end-to-end, and cost-effective way to give your DevOps team members the tools they need to do their best work for you. It’s a great replacement for eclectic tools that your developers may struggle to integrate.

The cloud-based Azure DevOps includes:

• Azure Boards for scrum management
• Azure Repos for source code management
• Azure Artifacts for package management
• Azure Pipelines for CI/CD orchestration
• Azure Test Plans for testing and quality management

Azure DevOps gives DevOps professionals a way to work collaboratively with business owners and users, who will find the tools easier to understand and less distracting to use. Azure DevOps also represents the next stage in the evolution of Visual Studio Team Services, so it will be familiar to the millions of developers already using that service.