How DevOps Plan accelerates project delivery and increases productivity with Artificial Intelligence (AI) Features

Author: Randy Langehennig

Date: Feb 3, 2025

Overview

IBM DevOps Plan is our BRAND NEW low-code/no-code change and workflow management solution that helps software delivery teams tackle critical challenges head on.   It helps our clients achieve their business aims by enabling multi-discipline teams to collaborate and improve efficiency of your delivery processes.

The benefits of IBM DevOps Plan solution include:

•          Improve planning and coordination
•          Boost productivity
•          Start projects faster
•          Strengthen governance
•          Promote collaboration
•          Enhance auditability

With IBM DevOps Plan, you can optimize your workflow effortlessly and tailored to your preferences.    IBM DevOps Plan comes with predefined schemas that are available to handle the vast majority of our customers needs.   The schema options include:

•          Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) – provides fields and rules to help coordinate software development activities and supports the lifecycle management of assets and their relationships.
•          DefectTracking – contains the fields required to start using DevOps Plan software to track defects in a software development environment.
•          Agile – workflow to support agile methodology including scrum, kanban or other agile hybrid methods.   The business flow supports sprint planning, backlog management, retrospective management, UX design, and many other capabilities.

You can even customize and create your own schema options using the DevOps Plan Schema Designer should that be necessary all in a modern user interface and experience.

Introducing AI to DevOps Plan

With IBM DevOps Plan, we have introduced new generative AI features to increase delivery efficiency, improve developer experiences, and boost productivity with data-driven features.   This blog will focus on providing examples of each AI feature available in DevOps Plan that are game changers for our clients.

IBM DevOps Plan can currently integrate with IBM Watsonx, OpenAI, and Azure OpenAI.   To setup that integration, you will go the Integrations view and add an AI provider of your choice and enter your API key for the given provider.    Here is an example from our demo setup:

With this integration in place, you can leverage the AI features in IBM DevOps Plan.    Let's explore some of the AI features together.

Conversational Input Example that Creates Records

In this first example of AI integration, we can click on AI in the left hand navigation towards the bottom and provide input as shown below:

In this example, we provided the following input as a question:

“Provide the necessary steps to implement a Keycloak solution in our enterprise application.”

When you click the Next button as highlighted above, you can apply different prompts to the responses.   Here are the different options available to you as shown below:

In this case, we clicked the ‘Generate Action Items’ checkbox.   When you do this, it goes to your AI provider of choice and provides the results as shown below:

If you click the Select pulldown menu as shown above, you can ‘Breakdown into Titles’ or ‘Create Record’.   In this case, we want to break each step down into a title so we select it that option as shown below:

This will break down each step into individual responses which you can then use to create individual work items as shown below:

You check each item needed, then select the record type, project, and type as shown above.  In this case, we will create 'Work Items' of type 'Story' for the 'Platform' project.   Click the ‘Create records’ button to complete this task.    

In the example above we created work items, however, you also use the same approach to create:

•          meeting notes - which will summarize notes from all the participants in a meeting
•          scrum notes
•          positive test cases
•          retrospective notes

and more.   As you can see, this is a big productivity boost for your team and your project!   I wish I had these features back when I was working on development projects at IBM.

AI Enhancements to Find Similar Records, Summarize Records, and Generate Reports for any Application Item

The second use case for AI in DevOps Plan is related to a given application item.   An application item could be a work item, an epic, a defect, etc.   There are three AI features available to help you as you work with an item:

•           Find similar records or application items (or duplicates)
•           Summarize an application item
•           Generate a report for an application item

Finding Similar Records to a Work Item

If you click on an application item (e.g. work item, epic, task, etc.) for example, and then click on the ‘More Info…’ tab as shown below:

The AI integration will find similar records to your title and description and present them to you as shown above.    Often this can be used to find duplicate work items if they are present.

Generate Summary for a Work Item

Further, if you click on the ‘Summarize’ item in the left-hand pane, you can click the ‘Generate Summary’ button as shown below.   This will use AI to summarize what is in an item (e.g. work item, epic, etc.).

There could be a lengthy history as well as a lot of conversations as examples associated with your work item.    This AI feature will generate a summary for you with all the relevant information in a summary format that looks like this:

You can also download the concise summary to share with others.  

Generate a Report for a Work Item

Finally, in a similar way, if you click on Report in the left-hand pane, you can generate a Report and download it as well as shown below:

Every part of the Rich Text Areas has AI

For our final AI use case in DevOps Plan, we will highlight how one can apply AI to each rich text field in a work item.   This means if you are working with an application item, each text area will have rich AI features available to it.  

For example, as we view a work item, we may want to apply AI to edit our Description field.    To do this, click the pencil icon to edit the work item as shown below:

When in edit mode, each field has rich text capabilities with AI.   In this case, notice the Description field now has an “AI Assistant” icon as highlighted below:

If you click on the AI button, the AI Assistant dialog will appear as shown below:

Notice the action buttons at the bottom.   You can leverage AI to enhance, create records, spell check, and even translate the text to another language.   If you wanted to translate to text to another language, you can click the ‘Translate’ button and you will be presented with options like this:

Simply fill out the fields as shown above and click the 'Generate' button.   Of course, you can breakdown the text to ‘Create children’ as you see above.  You could also use the ‘Spell check and grammar’ button to allow AI to help you in this area as well as ‘Enhance’, ‘Shorten’, and much more as shown above.

Summary

As you can see from this blog, AI can help boost productivity and improve the experience for a developer.    This is just the beginning of our integration of AI in our DevOps solutions including Plan.   We have new features coming that will build upon this initial offering.   For example, we plan to use AI to help generate test cases from user stories in the solution later in 2025.  

If you have any questions or would like to setup a trial of DevOps Plan in your organization to try out all the features, please do reach out to the IBM team and we would love to work with you.