In this guest blog post, Asif Sharif, Founder and Chief Technologist of Modern Requirements, describes how DevOps product owners can overcome several challenges by using Copilot4DevOps Plus, an essential AI tool for Azure DevOps.

A recent survey by Scrum Master Toolbox showed the most common problem product owners face is a lack of time. Causes include handling multiple projects, lacking required skills for certain duties, and mixing duties with other roles.

Challenges like these lead to several downstream requirements management issues in a DevOps context, including:

Wasted time because of the lengthy process of requirements completion
Insufficient time for thorough analysis and customer engagement
Incomplete or incorrect requirements because of human error or a skills gap
Employee burnout or dissatisfaction throughout the command chain

These issues create stakeholder dissatisfaction, inaccurate scope, more errors, and higher costs for the company. According to the Project Management Institute, incorrect requirements and poor scope management are key reasons projects fail. In software development, these errors can cause havoc, costing U.S. businesses an estimated $30 billion or more a year.

The costs of these errors increase significantly depending on when the error is caught, so it’s important to detect them early in the project lifecycle.

Figure 1. Catching errors earlier helps lower overall project costs.*

Product owners tend to use traditional requirements management tools to manage their workloads, but these tools can have steep learning curves, limited features, and difficult onboarding. They typically do not integrate well into a product owner’s workflow, leading to manual copy-pasting that can introduce errors.

Traditional requirements management tools also don’t streamline manual tasks like analyzing requirements, writing user stories, summarizing documents, and identifying compliance gaps. Product owners have been turning to ChatGPT for help with these tasks. But ChatGPT has limitations.

ChatGPT is not enough for product owners

While ChatGPT can generate new requirements from vague descriptions and analyze existing requirements for quality among other tasks, it has several disadvantages:

Good prompting can be hard

AI prompting is a significant advancement in human-machine interaction, but it is a mix of art and science. Two common challenges product owners might face when using ChatGPT are over- or under-specification of prompts and AI interpreting prompts literally. For instance, ChatGPT can misinterpret commands like “give me a brief answer” or “give me credible sources.” Exactly how short is brief? And what determines a source is credible? Additionally, adjusting AI output is also tough and may require switching between AI models and losing chat context, and employees who don’t follow AI elicitation best practices may generate inaccurate or vague responses from the AI.

Workflow disconnection
ChatGPT isn’t integrated with DevOps workflows. A product owner must manually copy instructions into its interface, switch tabs, then paste the results back in. They also might have to take the extra step of posting the answer into a Word document to reformat it before finally pasting it into their ALM. This manual, time-consuming process can mitigate or even reverse the time saving-benefits of using ChatGPT.
AI security concerns
In enterprises, it’s often uncertain who uses personal ChatGPT accounts on sensitive data, and whether they’ve disabled the training from chat data. An enterprise-sanctioned AI tool with a non-data-collecting API is preferred.

An AI tool that is secure by design and provides the benefits of ChatGPT without its drawbacks can solve these challenges. An ideal tool would integrate seamlessly within product owners’ DevOps workflows and have a familiar UI.

AI tailored for product owners

Incorporating AI into DevOps provides a powerful competitive edge. A Forbes poll showed 59 percent of workers thought AI increased their job satisfaction. OMFIF’s study of 5,000 agents showed AI assistance can increase worker productivity by 14 percent in white-collar jobs, particularly with novice and low-skilled workers.

Figure 2. AI assistance has affected a wide variety of white-collar worker tasks.**

Modern Requirements’ Copilot4DevOps Plus, available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, empowers product owners to access the benefits of generative AI within their Azure DevOps workflow.

Figure 3. Copilot4DevOps Plus is natively built into Azure DevOps and has several features designed to make projects easier.

A simple user interface makes it easy for product owners to get consistent, high-quality results without prompt engineering. It is also integrated directly into Azure DevOps and into the DevOps product owner workflow. Here is how its features match the challenges product owners face:

Product owner challenges
Relevant Copilot4DevOps Plus features

Wasted time because of the lengthy process of requirements completion.
Elicit complete, high-quality requirements and test cases in seconds.

Insufficient time for requirements analysis.
Analyze work item data for quality using the 6C method.

Long requirements documents that are tedious to read.
Summarize high-level requirements into concise, readable segments.

Good prompting on ChatGPT can be hard. Improper prompting reduces output quality and consistency.
Pre-configured prompts help maintain quote quality and consistency. Custom instructions available for further tailoring.

Time-consuming copy-pasting between tabs, which introduces errors.
Seamless integration into the familiar Azure DevOps UI.

Cross-functional communication with distributed teams speaking different languages across the world.
Translate work items and requirements into over 40 languages, enhancing collaboration.

Time-consuming creation of user stories and Gherkin plain text language that balance technical details with clarity.
One-click generation of user stories and Gherkin from requirements.

AI security concerns, use of personal accounts on sensitive data.
Securely handle sensitive data without training on it. Inherits all Azure DevOps, OpenAI, and Azure OpenAI service security protocols and updates.

Copilot4DevOps Plus offers several other powerful features Business Analysts (BAs), Quality Assurance (QAs), developers, and other DevOps professionals can use:

Dynamic prompts: Allows workers to apply tailored prompts to perform actions on selected Azure DevOps queries.
Pseudocode generation: Automatically generates pseudocode in many programming languages to help developers streamline coding tasks.
Test script creation: Generates test scripts in multiple programming languages, significantly reducing the time needed for test preparation.

Better together with Microsoft

Figure 4. Copilot4DevOps Plus extends the productivity benefits of Azure DevOps.

Copilot4DevOps Plus takes advantage of several Azure DevOps and Azure Marketplace benefits to drive significant business impact for product owners, including:

Azure OpenAI Service: When users choose to work with GPT-4 or GPT-4o, they get results though the Azure OpenAI Service API. This API typically has lower latency than the OpenAI API, and the data submitted is not transferred to OpenAI.
Inherited Azure DevOps security and compliance benefits: By inheriting Azure DevOps’ security and compliance benefits, Copilot4DevOps Plus ensures your data is protected and easily accessible. For instance, you have access to the same SSO capabilities. Microsoft has also obtained more than 100 compliance certifications, including ISO 27001, SOC 2, FedRAMP, PCI DSS, HIPAA, CCPA, Australia IRAP, and EU GDPR.
Familiar UI/integrated into Azure DevOps: Most enterprise customers use Microsoft products in some form, including Microsoft 365. The integration of Copilot4DevOps Plus into the familiar Azure DevOps interface makes it easy for teams to adopt and use Copilot4DevOps Plus.
Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment benefits: Copilot4DevOps is available in the Azure Marketplace, meaning customers may be able to apply their Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) credits toward buying licenses, reducing upfront expenses, and streamlining the procurement process.

AI empowers product owners to do more

Product owners face significant time constraints managing multiple projects and overlapping responsibilities, which often lead to erroneous or incomplete requirements. These issues can result in dissatisfied stakeholders, failing projects, and additional costs. Addressing these challenges is crucial for improving productivity and project success.

Copilot4DevOps Plus addresses these issues to speed up project execution, improve the quality of outcomes, and reduce errors. It is available in the Azure Marketplace and Visual Studio Marketplace.

Please visit the Copilot4DevOps Plus website for more information or to request a demo.

* Figure 1 source

** Figure 2 source

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