New! Azure Pipelines app for Microsoft Teams

[Amit Oberoi]

Azure Pipelines app on Microsoft Teams enables you to monitor the events for your pipelines. You can set up and manage subscriptions for releases, pending approvals, completed builds etc. and get notifications right into your Teams channel for these updates. You can also approve releases from within your Teams channel or on the go via a Teams mobile app.

Adding Azure Pipelines app to your team

You can install Azure Pipelines app from Microsoft Teams app store. Once the app is installed you have to connect the app to the pipelines you want to monitor. App would ask you to sign in and authenticate to Azure Pipelines before running any commands

Azure Pipelines Commands

Below is the list of all the commands that are supported for Azure Pipelines app

• @azure pipelines subscribe [pipeline url] - Subscribe to a pipeline to receive notifications
• @azure pipelines subscriptions - Add or remove subscriptions for this channel
• @azure pipelines feedback - Report a problem or suggest a feature
• @azure pipelines help - Get help on the slash commands
• @azure pipelines signin - Sign into your Azure Pipelines account
• @azure pipelines signout - Sign out from your Azure Pipelines account

Subscribing for notifications

To start monitoring a pipeline, use the following command inside a channel: ‘@azure pipelines subscribe [pipeline url]’. The pipeline URL can be to any page within your pipeline that has a definitionId or buildId/releaseId present in the URL.

Below are example for commands you can use for build and release pipelines:

• Build pipelines: ‘@azure pipelines subscribe https://dev.azure.com/myorg/myproject/_build?definitionId=123’
• Release pipelines: ‘@azure pipelines subscribe https://dev.azure.com/myorg/myproject/_release?definitionId=123&view=mine&_a=releases’

If you end up putting a wrong URL, bot will notify you and would ask for the correct URL. For Build pipelines, the channel is subscribed to the Build completed notification, and for Release pipelines, the channel is subscribed to the Release deployment started, Release deployment completed, and Release deployment approval pending notifications.

Managing subscriptions

Use the following command to view all the current subscriptions for the channel – ‘@azure pipelines subscriptions’. This is also the command to use to add new subscriptions with more filters, subscribe to new events like Release created or to remove existing subscriptions from the channel.

Approving release deployments

You can approve release deployments from notification card within your channel without navigating to the Azure Pipelines portal. Once you subscribe to any release pipeline you’ll start receiving release deployment approval pending notification in your channel.

Whenever a deployment is pending for approval, a notification card with options to approve or reject the deployment is posted in the channel. Users can then review the details of the deployment in the notification and take action.

The app supports all of the approval scenarios present in the Azure Pipelines portal, like single approver, multiple approvers (any one user, any order, in sequence), and teams as approvers. You can approve deployments as an individual or on behalf of a team.

[barryblessing]

This is a good development for MS Teams.  Thank you.  Because of the nature of the larger project structure I work within and the smaller team on said project that I am a member of, most dev work gets discussed in a dev team "group chat".

Can we install the pipeline "app" only within the context of that group chat?  If we don't, all of our dev-only discussions would need to be open to the rest of the team that I am on, as well as the larger project/epic, and it's many smaller teams.  While we could make that work, it would be a lot of unnecessary notifications/traffic for the rest of the project and other teams within the project.

[Robin-Cohesic]

Great start guys, however this extension is a bit too simplistic to suit our workflow.  Given the current design this tool ends up being far too chatty, generating so many messages that we've had to disable it to reduce noise.

My experiences with other CI notification plugins has shown that the most useful ones:

• Allow filtering of specific branches to avoid notifications on user, feature, and other branches which aren't useful to the entire team.
• Can notify on specific state changes, such as: all failing builds and any successful builds that previously failed.
• Can direct message users.
• Can be applied more than once to a specific pipeline, allowing multiple rulesets to be created based on the above.

I would love to see these same features provided in the Azure Pipelines app.

[shivam_mahendru777]

Would Vote for changes mentioned by @Robin-Cohesic .

Highest priority one would be: 

• Allow filtering of specific branches to avoid notifications on user, feature, and other branches which aren't useful to the entire team.