One of the biggest limitations of Azure DevOps has until now been the fact that you can’t retry an individual stage or step in a pipeline if it fails. Instead, you’d have to retry the entire pipeline again and hope that the failed stage passes.
As of September 2019, in most cases you can now retry a failed stage without the need to retry the whole pipeline – but there’s a catch. You’ll need to enable the Multi-stage pipelines preview feature, if you haven’t already. Note that this still doesn’t allow you to retry failed steps within a stage – rather it relies on the new multi-stage support to allow you to retry a collection of steps within a stage.
You can check if this is enabled by clicking your avatar in the top-right corner of the Azure DevOps portal, and then “Preview features”. Select “for this organisation [<your organisation name]” from the drop-down menu at the top of the screen, and scroll down until you see “Multi-stage pipelines”. If this is toggled off, you’ll need to turn this on before you can retry failed stages – you will need administrator rights to change it though.
Once you’ve enabled this, navigate back to your release pipelines and you should see the ability to re-rerun individual stages that fail throughout your pipeline.
Note that as this is still in beta, there are some limitations. Perhaps one of the biggest is that you can’t retry stages that are explicitly cancelled – only those that fail as a result of the task being run having an error can be retried today.