Microsoft Team System value within only a Dev Team

Question

Microsoft Team System appears to be a great platform for process-oriented systems implementation, however if you strip out access for the BAs, PM and Business Users and just purely use it within a Dev team does it have any more value than just using Visual Studio Professional, SourceSafe, a Defect Tracking Tool and a continuous integration server like CruiseControl or TeamCity?

Answer 1

Yes. Every replacement technology you've mentioned is something that is supported by the Team System package (either in this release or the next). All of these components are designed to integrate and work with each other in TFS. This is a high priority of the TFS team for all components. The result is a set of features which in most cases seamlessly integrate with each other.

I'm not familiar with several of the other projects you mentioned but it's unlikely that they integrate as well with each other as the corresponding TFS components. This is not to say they have no integration or perform poorly as products. Just that they are not designed ground up to work with each other. Hence the interaction will not be as crisp as the TFS components.

Is this valuable enough to continue using TFS? Don't know because it would be highly dependent on how much you value this integration.

Answer 2

One of the big selling points for TFS for my team is the coherency it provides to our overall product life cycle. We do allow BAs, PMs and Business Users to have certain levels of access to TFS, but even if we did not, the product would still be of great value to use. The ability to manage our workflows within TFS and enforce consistency across the development team is great.

Some of the features that TFS provides that we use: security, reporting, work flow management, integrated builds, email alerts, branching / merging.

Could you pull it off with a hodge-podge of other tools? Probably, but it wouldn't be as easy to manage and maintain and you probably wouldn't be able to pull out the kind of data necessary for reporting and tracking the way you can with TFS.

On a sidenote, if your counting on Visual SourceSafe as your repository I would highly suggest looking elsewhere. From personal and business experience, I can attest that it cannot be counted on as a stable/robust repository.

My thoughts.

Answer 3

Sure it has value. There are a ton of client features only in the Team SKUs (don't let the name fool you -- they are primarily just the new "super premium" kitchen-sink versions, that also have the nice bonus of including a server CAL for TFS.) Exact specs available here: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/teamsystem/default.mspx

Looking specifically at the collaboration features, again there's clear value in a system whose components were design to "just work" with each other. The setup is streamlined (though it has a ways to go); the UIs are consistent and accessible from each other; the backend feeds a unified reporting/analysis service. If you have a large team, the overall perf/scalability also far exceeds what the typical OSS suite is capable of at the moment.

The question is whether it's worth the $$ to you. Why use Visual Studio Professional instead of SharpDevelop? Why SourceSafe instead of Git? Why not Notepad and specially labeled folders?

All of the commercial products are commercial for a reason (ok, maybe not SourceSafe!). If you want something with a broad feature set, tight integration, well-defined support & testing lifecycle, good fit & finish, etc then it's usually worthwhile to spend the $$ and let your development staff get on with their work. If you don't mind doing setup & troubleshooting yourself, switching between several applications as part of the development workflow, losing the ability to query & report on team statistics as a whole, etc then by all means go open source -- many OSS dev tools are very solid nowadays.