TFS Reviews

Source control, and work item tracking, from user experience, it is very easy to relate code versions with work items, and to track your changes easily from multiple interfaces "Visual Studio, TFS web browser."

Also, the API for managing TFS programmatically is very powerful, you can listen on work items changes by TFS events.

Also, you can easily create, update, and delete work-items from the code itself.

In addition, you can extend Visual Studio IDE by adding extensions that you can use with TFS API, to extend the work items module.

Microsoft provide a full BI solution for reporting , and analyze the TFS data in order to bring powerful reports for top management

Recent changes/upgrades that were made:

-New software processes was added.
-Ability to create custom dashboards for each team project on TFS web browser.
-Ability to integrate with Microsoft enterprise project management tool, which covers the gap between software process, and project management tasks

We implemented the scrum process in our company, and we used TFS as the main tool to manage that process.

We upgraded to TFS 2017, which has a lot of features for SCRUM process that can be managed from a web browser.

For over seven years.

Yes, sometimes we feel that it need more CPU, and RAMs on TFS server, either we implemented the hardware with the product minimum requirements.

No, it is very easy to scale it up.

I haven't needed to contact them.

I used before IBM Clear Quest, which had a very bad interface, was very expensive as they price per user, was very hard to modify screens, no flexibility to extend, and by the way it can only be integrated with IBM Clear Case source control.

TFS also is one license for multiple products "source control, work item, build management, reports" also it integrates easily with other products, by its powerful API.

Also it is not easy to find an IBM CQ , or an IBM CC consultant, while it is easier to find a TFS consultant.

It is very straightforward.

Excellent, especially if you have an enterprise license agreement with Microsoft.

See my prior answer about previous solutions used.

Try to bring the latest version, TFS 2017.

The full ALM experience that means you can have all your information in one place. For example having everything linked together – your build linked to changes in source control which link to the work items the prompted the changes in the first place, linked to the tests that were run. This is essential when you work in an industry which requires traceability. However, all this doesn’t detract from the fact that TFS supports and encourages agile ways of working.

The level of customisation on TFS allows you to change any parts of the process to suit any organisation’s need.

TFS replaced a number of separate source control, work item and build solutions that were stretched to their limits, since adopting TFS we have been able to scale the development department without any limits from our tooling.

TFS has aided our agile transformation by providing digital Kanban boards that have enabled teams to be more productive when working remotely from one another.

I have a list things on the Visual Studio uservoice page, but none of them are major. I’m expecting most of the issues we have to the moment to be resolved in the 2015 lifecycle.

I've been using TFS for five years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

I’ve never contacted the official support channels, but I have received support via blog posts and e-mailing some of the public facing people and each time the responses have been excellent. I’ve been quickly put in touch with developers who are experts in the field and had my questions answered or my problem resolved. I have even helped to diagnose and log a bug against TFS that Microsoft were struggling with in VSOnline.

The decision was not mine, but it was based on having a complete ALM solution instead of just a bunch of systems thrown together.

Setting up TFS 2010 was quite complex, as it is an enterprise product, but nothing too complicated, just a lot of reading to make sure all the parts worked. SharePoint was hard to configure, but we no longer integrate them.

In our company, we develop software applications. With TFS we can manage the whole application lifecycle with a single product, and it is visible for all the team members.

I can point to two basic improvements:

1. The project management. Before TFS, we used Microsoft Project and Excel to manage project tasks and release dates (only the Project Manager could do this). Since we adopted Scrum as a part of software development, we needed an agile tool to perform this task. TFS it is a great tool to manage Agile projects because the whole team is kept up to date with TFS burn down charts, release dates and so on, so we eliminated the need for Project.
2. We can use TFS to perform Continuous Integration, making build operations each night. This increases quality process and prevents code regressions.

Continuous integration in most of .NET developments (web and desktop applications) is ease to configure. But in case of other kind of developments (SharePoint or Xamarin) is not so easy, you have to spend a lot of time making customizations. It would be nice to have some integrations tools for this kind of projects.

I've used it for one year.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

We could find all the required information in Microsoft’s online support (websites, blogs etc.), so I can’t rate the customer service for this product.

We used TFS 2010. We don’t evaluate any other product because we only use Microsoft products.

For our needs, we choose a basic configuration, one single server. In our case it was easy to set up the whole system.

In-house. We have the required people to set up the product on our own, in some cases, it is better to call a vendor team.

• project Life cycle
• Bug tracking
• Creating test cases
• Executing test cases

As i'm an Software Quality Engineer It's a helpful product because you can provide project analysis from scratch and create a requirements document for maintenance. Also, it creates a strong relation between developers and testers that allows communication between them through analysis, design, implementation and testing, tracking bugs, bugs report, sitting severity and priority and discuss each issue with developer acc. to requirement document.

I don't know of any areas that need improvement.

I've used it for over a year.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No previous solution was used.

It was straightforward. You can learn how to do it through self-study.

It's an integrated system that includes all the information that we need to deliver our products smoothly and to track the progress of each piece of code.

It's one continuous integrated solution that includes the code. We can put all of our work from tasks with cases and user tool requirements.

The dashboard needs more enhancements.

We use TFS for source control and we use code to connect to TFS as well. It's all generated and the normal process for a developer; we take the latest coding, and whenever there is a build required, we get the latest from other developers and carry out the build. We also do branching and leveling. I'm a solution architect and our company has a partnership with Microsoft. 

The features such as branching and labelling are very good because they actually help you create a master branch which is a running branch. You can then have other branches like staging correction. I also like the user interface, it's intuitive and easy to use and, most importantly, you can access it from the browser.

When you are trying to connect from Visual Studio code to TFS the integration isn't so easy and I think that could be improved. There's one feature we'd really like to see. If I want to scan through how many files have checked out by name, there are no extensions or plugins available for us to readily get the information from TFS because it's being managed by someone else. As a development partner, we're dependent on them for the details and our preference would be to have the ability to do that ourselves. 

I've used multiple versions of TFS over the past decade. 

The scalability of the solution is good. There are 20 developers in my specific project who use TFS for storing the code repository. We work on multiple projects so there can be anywhere up to 25 people in the company using the product at any one time. It's a development tool so we use it on a daily basis as a centralized code repository.

The initial setup is quite simple. I found information from the Azure DevOps portal and they have a lot of videos. 

This is a good tool for core depository, but there are a lot of thing in TFS you can do: You can automate the entire update process. You can run your sprint and everything, it's a good option enterprise wise. Nowadays everything has DevOps so it's a good thing to use. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

Reports for user stories statuses, hours logged, burn down charts, etc.

We are able to manage the work more effectively. Everyone has a current status at any given point of time.

Help on the site should be improved.

A year and half.

Not as of now.

No.

Have not reached out to technical support.

We used HP QC, then we moved to TFS because of the client's affinity towards TFS.

Straightforward.

Pricing is better compared to other leading tools.

No.

This tool is good for agile projects, and it has all features which QC provides.

The scrum template to manage our development process, as well as the continuous build and release functionality.

It helps us to manage our Scrum process, as well as continuous integration, but not much more than the previous product we used (JIRA).

Agile metrics/reporting (if you compare it to JIRA's functionality), as well as more/better customizable widgets to create richer dashboards.

I would really like to be able to see things such as cycle and lead times for issues, as well as be able to see the cumulative flow diagram on a dashboard.

We use the on-premise version of TFS, and I see that the cycle and lead time widgets are only available on the Team Services version.

I must admit that I don't like the fact that the on-premise versions are always behind the Team Services version. Do you maybe have an indication of when we can expect to have these widgets available in the on-premise version?

We have been using TFS 2017 for three weeks now. However, we have been on the previous versions (2013 & 2015) for three years.

No.

No.

We have had no need for any technical support so far. Should we require technical support, I don't know if it will be readily available in South Africa.

Yes, we used JIRA. Since we have to pay for Visual Studio, licenses for coding purposes (and these licenses included TFS) it did not make sense to continue paying for JIRA, even though I really liked the JIRA solution.

We got an external consultant to help us with the initial setup so it was pretty straight forward. Since then I was able to make all the required changes.

Pricing and licensing model is still quite complex, as are all of Microsoft's products.

We did not evaluate other options, but like I mentioned, we were using the Atlassian suite of products.

Make sure that you understand Microsoft's licensing model and that you select the process templates that are most suitable to you when setting up the product for the first time. Different process templates have different reports that you can view.