Azure DevOps Roadmap: Pros & Cons

Azure DevOps is a Microsoft platform used by software development teams to plan, build, test and deliver applications. It brings together work tracking, source control and CI/CD in one environment.

This article examines the Azure DevOps Roadmap, focusing on its strengths and limitations for software development teams executing multiple projects.

What Is the Azure DevOps Roadmap?

The Azure DevOps Roadmap is a visual planning view that helps software development teams map epics and features over time. It shows how work is scheduled across iterations and teams, making it easier to communicate delivery plans, coordinate development efforts and provide stakeholders with a high-level view of upcoming work.

It’s popular among software development teams because it integrates directly with existing backlogs and Agile workflows, allowing teams to plan and track delivery without leaving the Azure DevOps ecosystem.

However, a common frustration among users is that Azure DevOps does not include a roadmap as an obvious, built-in feature. Instead, roadmap functionality is delivered through Delivery Plans, which many perceive as an extra configuration step. Community feedback often describes this as unnecessary friction, especially for teams expecting an immediately available roadmap view. For some users, needing to enable or discover Delivery Plans makes roadmap planning feel less intuitive and less polished than tools where roadmaps are available by default.

Azure DevOps Roadmap Key Features

The Azure DevOps Roadmap is built on core Azure Boards features that help teams structure, schedule and visualize software development work over time.

• User Stories: Represent end-user requirements that roll up into features and epics, allowing roadmap timelines to reflect customer-focused delivery plans.
• Epics: High-level initiatives that group related features and appear on the roadmap to communicate long-term development objectives.
• Work Items: The foundational elements of Azure DevOps that power the roadmap, including tasks, stories and features scheduled across iterations.
• Bugs and Issues: Track defects and problems as work items, enabling teams to factor quality-related work into roadmap planning.
• Product Backlog: Centralized, prioritized list of work items that feeds roadmap views and ensures timelines reflect current development priorities.
• Kanban Boards: Visual boards used to manage workflow states, complementing roadmap timelines with real-time execution visibility.
• Sprints and Iterations: Time-boxed cycles that define when roadmap items are planned, helping teams align delivery with Agile cadence.
• Swimlane Boards: Board lanes that separate work by priority, type or class of service, improving clarity when planning roadmap items.

ProjectManager is the perfect complement for the Azure DevOps roadmap because it helps software development teams manage all of their projects and initiatives in one place thanks to its award-winning project portfolio management features. ProjectManager integrates bi-directionally with Azure DevOps and offers robust resource management, cost tracking, and project budgeting tools such as project portfolio roadmaps, workload charts, timesheets and real-time dashboards to better allocate resources across projects, monitor their utilization and establish baselines to identify cost and schedule slippage.

What Is Azure DevOps Roadmap Used For?

Now that we’ve established how Azure DevOps supports software development teams, let’s look at the most common ways teams use the Azure DevOps Roadmap to plan, coordinate and communicate their work.

• Planning software feature delivery timelines by mapping epics and features across iterations to align development work with release goals.
• Coordinating work across multiple Agile teams by visualizing how features are scheduled and progress through shared iteration cycles.
• Communicating delivery expectations to stakeholders by presenting a high-level timeline of upcoming features without exposing task-level complexity.
• Aligning sprint planning with long-term product goals by showing how short-term iterations contribute to broader development objectives.
• Tracking progress of epics and features over time to identify schedule variances or delivery risks early.
• Visualizing dependencies between related work items across teams to improve coordination and reduce delivery bottlenecks.
• Supporting release planning discussions by providing a shared roadmap view that reflects current backlog priorities and iteration assignments.

Azure DevOps Roadmap Pricing

In this section, we’ll review Azure DevOps pricing as it relates to roadmap usage, including the base access level required and the most commonly used Microsoft-supported add-ons and integrations that teams rely on to extend roadmap and planning capabilities.

• Azure DevOps Basic plan ($6 per user per month): Required to use Azure DevOps Roadmaps and Delivery Plans. Includes access to Azure Boards, backlogs, iterations and roadmap views. The first five users are free; additional users cost $6 per user per month.
• Delivery Plans extension (no additional cost): As stated above, this is the Microsoft-supported Azure DevOps extension that needs to be added to Azure DevOps in order to use the roadmap tool to visualize work across teams and iterations. Available through the Azure DevOps Marketplace.
• Azure DevOps Basic + Test Plans ($52 per user per month): A higher-tier plan that adds advanced test management features such as test case management and exploratory testing. It does not enhance roadmap functionality directly.
• Azure Boards (Included with the Azure DevOps Basic plan): Core Azure DevOps service that provides epics, features, user stories, backlogs and iteration planning, all of which feed roadmap and Delivery Plan views.
• Azure Test Plans ($52 per user per month): Microsoft test management service used alongside roadmaps to track validation and testing progress across features and releases. Included with the Azure DevOps Basic + Test Plans license.
• Azure Pipelines integration: Allows roadmap items and work items to be linked to CI/CD pipelines for build and release visibility. Included with Azure DevOps user licenses; pipeline usage beyond free tiers may incur additional usage-based costs.
• Power BI integration: Official Microsoft integration used to create portfolio and delivery dashboards based on Azure DevOps data. Requires a separate Power BI license for Power BI Pro.

Pros of Azure DevOps Roadmap for Software Development Projects

In a nutshell, Azure DevOps Roadmaps are a solid option for planning and scheduling software development projects because they build directly on familiar Agile artifacts such as epics, features, user stories and iterations.

Software development teams can visualize delivery timelines, coordinate sprint-based work, track dependencies between work items in a tool that feels tailored to their needs and share a clear delivery plan with stakeholders while staying closely aligned with their development backlogs easily.

Cons of Azure DevOps Roadmap for Software Development Projects

Azure DevOps Roadmaps work best when teams are managing a single software development project or product backlog. They provide useful delivery visibility for epics, features and iterations within that context. However, their main limitation emerges when teams run multiple projects in parallel. Azure DevOps Roadmaps aren’t designed to function as a portfolio view, making it difficult for software development teams to understand how all ongoing projects, initiatives and priorities relate to one another at scale today.

No Project Portfolio Roadmaps

One major drawback of the Azure DevOps roadmap is that it cannot display multiple independent projects in a single roadmap view. Roadmaps are built around one product backlog or closely related backlogs, not separate initiatives. As a result, software development teams lack a single roadmap to visualize all active projects in a portfolio, releases and long-term initiatives together at the same time visually.

No Project Dependencies

Because Azure DevOps lacks true project portfolio roadmaps, teams also cannot visualize dependencies between separate projects. This makes it difficult to understand sequencing, coordination and timing across initiatives. Software development teams may not see that one project must finish before another can start, or that two projects should run concurrently to optimize the use of shared organizational resources.

No Resource Allocation Features

Azure DevOps roadmaps do not provide resource allocation capabilities. Teams cannot assign work to named individuals from the roadmap, view personal workloads, track hourly rates or assess availability. As a result, managers cannot use the roadmap to balance capacity, identify overallocations or make informed staffing decisions across projects and initiatives in dynamic, multi-project software development environments today or growing organizations.

No Gantt Charts

Azure DevOps’ roadmap can visually resemble a Gantt chart because it displays work items along a timeline. However, this similarity is largely superficial. Unlike a true Gantt chart in robust project management software such as ProjectManager, Azure DevOps’ roadmap lacks a structured data grid that shows detailed task-level information alongside the timeline.

There are no columns for planned versus actual start and end dates, planned versus actual duration or planned versus actual costs. The roadmap doesn’t support cost tracking columns, resource allocation from the Gantt view, work breakdown structure (WBS) levels, four types of task dependencies or automated critical path analysis. It also lacks custom columns and a task assignee column. All of these capabilities are available in ProjectManager’s Gantt chart.

No Critical Path Analysis

Azure DevOps’ roadmap does not provide critical path analysis. While work items can be linked, the roadmap doesn’t calculate or highlight the sequence of tasks that directly determine a project’s finish date. This makes it harder to manage tight delivery deadlines or assess schedule risk, especially when coordinating multiple projects or planning work at a portfolio level.

No Cost Estimating or Project Budgeting

Azure DevOps’ roadmap does not allow teams to enter tasks, estimate their costs and build a project budget. There is no way to establish a cost baseline and track actual project costs against it over time. The roadmap also doesn’t support defining employee pay rates. In contrast, ProjectManager’s Gantt chart allows teams to create a software development roadmap, enter tasks, assign resources, define hourly rates and automatically track labor costs, as well as estimate and monitor non-labor resource costs.

No Milestone Charts

Azure DevOps’ roadmap does not include a dedicated feature for defining or managing project milestones. As a result, teams cannot create a milestone chart to highlight key delivery points or phase completions. This limits its usefulness for executive and stakeholder communication, where high-level milestone roadmaps are often needed to show how a software development project is expected to progress over time.

Why Software Development Teams Love ProjectManager’s Integration with the Azure DevOps Roadmap

The integration between Azure DevOps and ProjectManager is ideal for software development teams that manage multiple projects or products simultaneously. While Azure DevOps excels at tracking delivery within individual teams and backlogs, ProjectManager fills the portfolio-level gaps by providing a centralized view of all projects in one place. Teams gain visibility into resource utilization across projects, making it easy to see how each person’s time is allocated and quickly identify over- or underutilization using workload balancing charts.

ProjectManager’s Gantt chart acts as a true project and portfolio roadmap, allowing teams to allocate resources to tasks, compare planned versus actual dates and costs, and track progress in real time. Its dashboards provide instant insight into budgets, costs to date, remaining budgets and overall project health using real-time charts with visual project status indicators. Combined with detailed project portfolio management reports, this integration gives software development teams the delivery focus of Azure DevOps and the portfolio control needed to scale effectively.

Related Azure Devops Content

• ProjectManager + Azure DevOps
• Azure DevOps for Project Management: Pros and Cons

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