1 Cool Azure DevOps Widget

If you are a manager of a development team or really a member of a team that is using Azure DevOps for code repositories then you may or may not be leveraging Azure DevOps Dashboards. They can offer you a quick glimpse at what is happening on your team which can significantly speed up your review time every day and every week. Recently I came across a really cool widget that you can add to your dashboards called Code Tile. Here are just a few advantages and disadvantages of this widget.

Advantages of the Code Tile Widget

1. It is significantly more useful than the total number of commits you see on your overview page for your project (which you cannot drill down from for some super frustrating reason).
2. You can see at a glance which repositories are active in the past week and then drill down from there to look at the actual code for those commits.
3. It's incredibly fast to setup for each project (depending on your number of repositories of course).
4. You don't have to be using the project management tools in Azure DevOps to use this widget (most of the widgets in the marketplace do require that).

Disadvantages of the Code Tile Widget

1. You have to pick one specific branch to monitor (I would recommend the one that is your final branch or the one that you will always do your PR's from). The workaround is to just pick the right one for your team.
2. You cannot select just one day for a time interval. In general, I would like to review this daily and the Code Tile limits your choices significantly. The workaround here is to just go with it and/or keep notes as to where you were the prior day.

In general the advantages at least for our team at Mainline.gg far outweigh the disadvantages. This is just another tool to help manage your teams and track progress. It obviously is not a replacement for whatever project management suite you use but it is a quick way to facilitate code reviews and just keep the whole team aware of what others might be working on at a glance.

I would also highly recommend that you take a look at the other dashboard widgets available in the Microsoft marketplace for Azure DevOps. You may find exactly what you are looking for there to make your organization more effective and to help you track your progress as you practice whatever development methodology is right for you.