Microsoft’s Azure DevOps team has updated its roadmap for the service, giving users a heads-up on what they can expect over the next two quarters.

The most changes come in Azure Pipelines which will get GitHub Enterprise and BitBucket support for YAML-based pipelines in the first quarter. It also gets some visual designer features in the YAML editor, to make it easier to author YAML pipelines, and will see the debut of multi-stage pipelines.

Azure DevOps will also overhaul the “hosted pools experience”, to create a single agent pool. Currently, users see multiple hosted pools, and their full panoply of agent slots, which the team believe can cause confusion as it is hard to realize that all the concurrency is possibly used by other pools.

Microsoft also promises improved reporting on Azure Pipelines, tracking the “trend of pipeline”, with the success rate and insights on how to improve it.

Azure Repos is due to get get Rebase and Fast Forwarding as merge options for pull requests, with a public preview this quarter. In Q2, it will also preview branch policy administration improvements, by not requiring users to navigate away from branch policies admin page, and adding the ability to set a policy across all reposts in a project.

Other improvements include enabling all artifact types to trigger a release, and shortening the refresh time between publishing a package to a feed and making it available via upstream sources to 15 minutes.

Microsoft will implement a “top publisher program”, for extensions that meet its policies, adoption and support benchmarks. Lastly, it promises changes to administration, by improved connecting with Azure Active Directory, and pushing out improved security and organisation settings.