TFS Reviews

We use TFS for project management.

Basically, the capacity to construct various products is something I find handy. For example, I could write a user story and then add some tasks to it, as well as subtasks and test cases.

Everything can be linked together, making it easy for us to track down and document hours for each and every task, whether it's a task, above, or anything else.

Everything is interconnected. As a result, tracking and viewing the bulletin board dashboard and burndown charts, among other things, is much easier.

It's a one-stop solution that is useful and makes it easier to handle.

The overall ability in the Agile process has some room to improve, even though it is interconnected. When I worked on Jira, it had the capability of better linkage.

When it comes to project management, we are having trouble with burndown charts, which we can't seem to display. As a result, we have created new tasks and realigning our process. Rather than creating larger tasks, we are creating subtasks such as development tasks, QA tasks, and deployment tasks.

An area of improvement is when there is a login for a specific user story present, it should display automatically. This is an area that where we are having difficulty and struggling in.

The scalability can be improved.

Linkage and task management are two areas that we are having difficulties with. It could be more like Jira, which has a number of different plugins. In addition, I feel that the status should include additional options. For example, they offer fewer options for a specific task user story or bugs.

I'm looking for specific options that aren't currently available, such as active status, new status, or what's currently in progress. I would like to see an in-progress capability where you can mark it active, but you can also write that it is in progress. When I look at the dashboard, there is nothing there to show me what has been done or why it is active or not.

My company has been using TFS since it started. It may be more than 10 years. I joined the company a year ago.

We have been using it through the cloud during COVID and working from home. We can connect to it from any network.

There have been some lags in the past, and we have also encountered some latency when setting it up on the laptop. You may have some problems at first, but as soon as you connect to the internet and update your product, everything becomes stable.

Within our organization, for example, we use Microsoft Teams for communication, chats, and for calls. We had some issues with it being unreliable and not fully airing the sound over the laptop speakers and mic. I discovered that as soon as we updated the product, the stability was restored. There was a problem with Teams, which they fixed and updated.

Initial difficulties are to be expected, but things are constantly improving.

It can be scaled to some extent. The main issue is that, unlike Jira or any other tool, the burndown chart is not displayed.

I have never used technical support because I've never been in a situation where it has gone down and I needed to contact them, but I believe that because Microsoft is a reputable organization with adequate technical support right now.

I have also worked with Jira.

I come from a QA background, and we used to do automation. Jira was far easier to integrate with our QA automation frameworks because it has a large number of exposed APIs and public APIs that we could use, which is a positive development. Also, the burndown charts, as well as the ability to manage different Agile model frameworks, where we could use scrum in one project but also had to use Kanban. As a result, the transition from one framework to another was simple. These are the things I found useful but haven't seen in the case of TFS yet.

Initially, TFS was a bit complicated. Now that it's Azure DevOps the initial setup is much easier.

It's a one-stop shop for building code repository, and a version control system within TFS or Azure DevOps, as TFS has been renamed.

I am a project manager.

I would rate TFS a seven out of ten

We use it for software development, but we are moving to Jira.

We work with life science companies, and they need traceability. Because we have the capability of being able to provide the traceability that they require, it helps us with laying out what they need for their validation efforts.

The traceability is valuable. While managing the workflows, it was always nice to have that traceability from requirements and all the way through design. It integrates with Microsoft Test Manager (MTM), and you can have everything that is related to a requirement attached to it.

It has been really dated. When you start to work more in an agile environment, it is not really that flexible. They tried to replicate the look and feel of Jira, but it is not quite there. It was nice to use in the past, but it is not as flexible now with the changing development environments and methodologies.

It should have some of the things that Jira has, such as boards. We're focused on the scrum boards where you can actually drag and drop work from one queue to another. There should be more flexibility where you can just drag and drop as a user and have more visibility about what's active, what's not, and what's assigned to you through dashboards.

I have been using this solution for almost 14 years.

It was quite stable. We did not have a lot of issues over all those years. So, it definitely was a reliable solution for a long period of time. It just was not flexible when we started moving to a more agile model.

It was able to scale to meet our needs. It also allowed us to do our customization. I'm not sure if that ended up being a good thing, but it did allow us to do what we wanted it to do.

We have about 150 users, and they're developers, FQA, software quality engineers, business analysts, user experience team members, and architects. For its deployment and maintenance, in general, there are four or five people. They are from the DevOps team.

We don't plan to expand its usage. We're transitioning to Jira.

Their support was good. We had the support we needed for both TFS and Microsoft Test Manager.

We were not using any different solution. This company has been working with TFS for as long as I can remember. We're now transitioning to Jira.

It was fairly complex, but some of it was due to us. We did more configuration and customization, and because we customized the system, it made it more complicated.

In terms of duration, some of our previous upgrades took several days. Most of that was the actual deployment, but the preparation took several weeks.

We did use an integrator once or twice. Our experience with them was good. It was easier because we didn't have to worry about a lot of things. They took the burden of the effort, and we just had to give them information.

We haven't quantified that. In general, there has been a great time saving because with what we've done around validation artifacts, we've been able to build it right into the system. So, we can automatically generate it at the end of a release. Earlier, it would've taken us six weeks to put together a validation package. With what we've set up in TFS, it would take us a week at the max.

I was working with the engineering team, and that was not under my umbrella. From what I can remember, its license was yearly. They had the licenses on a per-user basis, and they included MTM.

I'm not really sure what they did. It was already in place when I joined the company.

I would advise Microsoft to update the tool. If a lot of users are starting to move to Jira because of the agile environment, Microsoft might want to adapt a little faster and provide similar or better functionality. It has been reliable for a very long time, and I've been really happy with it, but you've got to be able to change with the methodologies and the environments.

I would rate it a six out of 10 because it hasn't changed enough. I would've given it a much higher rating years ago, but because of the lack of evolution and not being able to adapt to the current business needs, its rating is not higher at this point.

With respect to all the Microsoft Stack development, we use TFS as a repository and source version control system.

TFS is very user-friendly. It is easy to use and has a smaller learning curve.

TFS should allow more integration with different platforms.

I have been using TFS for the past four to five years.

TFS is a stable and robust solution.

TFS is a scalable solution.

I have never used Microsoft’s technical support.

We used SSMS and Visual Studio before, but then we switched to TFS because it is a native product of Microsoft.

The setup was straightforward. It took only five to ten minutes to deploy.

We did it in-house. TFS is user-friendly. So we do not require much help to deploy. An administrator can implement it.

TFS is worth its money.

TFS is not cheap. We pay for monthly licensing at the enterprise level.

I use the 2022 version of TFS. Currently, we are integrating GitHub with Visual Studio. It is a better combination when compared to TFS. So our organization is leveraging it. I haven’t faced any issues with TFS’s performance. GitHub can be used on many different platforms. That is why we shifted from TFS to GitHub for version control.

For data integration projects, to deploy the integration solution, we need to prepare the files based on the specifications. Then it is deployed into the production or any other environment we want to deploy.

My organization has been using TFS for a long time now. From the time I joined the organization, I have been using TFS. Now we use GitHub because Microsoft has acquired GitHub. If required, we can also add more developers to TFS. I’m not a part of the purchasing department, so I do not know the exact price of TFS. I would rate TFS a nine out of ten.

TFS can support multiple code repositories (example: Git, TFS, CVS, etc.) via plugins, which is really a nice feature.

As I mentioned, it supports multiple code repositories. You can also build CI/CDs out of it. You can instruct TFS to build your .jar, .war, and .ear files and deploy them to to certain environments based on your configuration. So you don’t have explicitly maintain another code repository and CI/CD tools for your continuous integration/build purpose. This also automatically reduces DevOp burden and the number of people maintaining that DevOp work.

It needs huge improvement on its Agile functionality.

For more than a year, until I left the company.

No.

No.

We had our own support member (so I can't rate their support).

Yes, I used to use VersionOne, HP AGM, and JIRA to track and monitor Agile practice in my previous companies. At Lennox they had only one option, TFS.

I wasn’t involved in this process.

I wasn’t involved in discussions of pricing or licensing for TFS at Lennox.

As far as I‘m aware, the company decided to use TFS without evaluating other options.

There are better tools for Agile and CI/CD in the market. TFS may be good for code repository purposes; however, it's not the best for Agile practice.

We use TFS for forecast management.

The tool is sufficient for our business.

We encounter issues with backups.

I have been using the solution for three to four years.

TFS' stability is fine.

I rate the tool's scalability an eight out of ten.

The solution's technical support is very good.

TFS is easy to install. We had a team of two to three persons to handle the deployment.

TFS is a scalable and useful solution. I rate it a seven out of ten.

We are developers using the TFS for controlling, and for continuously developing our code.

I am not familiar with all of the features, as I only use it a bit for some of my projects. 

I am using the new kit because it is open source and has many good features.

What I like the most is that you can set permissions on just one folder.

For me, it was easy to use.

There are many things that I cannot do, and I have a lot of bugs. For example, if I want to merge two branches together, sometimes TFS will merge them automatically and I couldn't find the changes and had to check them myself.

That wasn't very good for me and I couldn't understand all of them and wasn't able to interact with them.

The merging could be simplified and improved.

I would like to see more features included for branching so that it copies your source code to the other branch, and have it in a separate folder.

We have been using this solution for five years.

We have not had any issues with stability. It's a stable product.

It's a scalable solution. We have 100 users in our organization.

I found the initial setup straightforward and easy.

We have a team of four or five to maintain this solution.

We are using the open-source version.

I would recommend this solution to others. It's definitely a good product. If you are looking to set up custom privileges then it's a good option for you. It has several features. If you want to secure your code, TFS is a good choice, as it can do it easily.

I would rate TFS a five out of ten.

Valuable features include total traceability, test management, source control, and extensibility.

The solution gives us support for Agile processes, including usage of board and burndown charts. It provides us with an estimation process to move to formal and test coverage for more visibility and accountability.

• Test automation: There is only integration with the MS framework which requires us to use only a certain configured infrastructure. Even MS is changing this approach as integration should be done on your own (publishing test execution results into TFS).
• Process customization: This is evolving but it is still far behind the competitors such as JIRA WI management, HPE ALM with events model and ability to manage all aspects of integration including VersionOne integration with multiple APIs.
• Scaling for large organizations: There is no predefined approach for handling different types of projects. You need to build out your own way using community suggestions and your implementation resources. There are limited scaling strategies for large organizations with more than 300 users.

We have been using the solution for more than five years.

There were some minor stability issues under a large load or during migration between versions.

For large organizations with more than 200+ concurrent users, there can be some scalability issues.

The technical support has been getting better since 2015, when MS started making more frequent releases, including a user voice application.

Previously, we were using HPE ALM, QA Manager, Atlassian Stack, and small, customized ALM products. The change was made at the corporate level.

It depends on the project/organization size. For a small organization/team, it is very easy. For a large one, the process definition takes more time and then the setup can happen.

If you have an MSDN license for using TFS, it is a good tool to start from. Later on, you may prefer to select another suite. However, you need to be sure about change. TFS, as from 2015, is evolving very quickly including the CI server, GIT server, and code review process with pull requests support inside.

We evaluated HPE ALM, JIRA, and VersionOne.

Look for the cloud version. It will give you an understanding of further development of the product.

We do a user story for a use case, which is like a snapshot of one pass through a use case. We tend to align them with the branches in Git. We have story branches created in Git and edited in TFS, which correspond to user stories based on a use case.

The solution's iteration board is good because you can track all your work with it. In TFS, you can do pull requests, trigger builds automatically, and gate them so that they're reviewed thoroughly before you release them. It is a good practice that makes things a lot easier.

If you've got 100 iterations and you create a new story and try to select which iterations, it doesn't default to the current iteration. You have to scroll right down to iteration 100 in the drop-down list. It would be good if it defaulted to the current iteration rather than having to go down a long drop-down list to select it when it's right at the end.

IBM ClearCase has something called a Version Tree, where you can see all the commits and updates to the configuration as a series of nodes in a tree diagram. You can also do mergers from the different branches using that. I'd like to see some kind of visualization tool for TFS that would make life much easier.

I have been using TFS for six to seven years.

I rate TFS ten out of ten for stability.

Hundreds of users in our organization use TFS.

I rate TFS a nine or ten out of ten for scalability.

The solution's initial setup is not too difficult. The people who set it up were experts who could quickly get it up and running. So, it looked like the setup was straightforward for them.

TFS is deployed on the cloud in our organization.

Overall, I rate TFS an eight out of ten.