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Why should I switch from TFS to Atlassian?

James Barwick

Atlassian seems extremely uninterested in selling me their products. They always ask me to go research and find the answers. In our 8 month software selection project, which is now coming to a close, the general consensus is that we should continue on our TFS platform. I am looking for people or documents or blogs from people that have moved off of TFS and onto Atlassian products. I need some final ammunition before the end. Please help.

Accepted answers

James Barwick

The tools in the spreadsheet above are required to satisfy the requirements of our new Software Development and Implementation Methodology which has been a pretty long project so far. And, there are some that were very impressed with Microsoft's presentation on TFS last month (I, unfortunately was unable to attend as I am on the other side of the planet).

So, it seems like I have my answer.

Use TFS.

Thanks All! Your feedback has been most appriciated!

All comments

Andrzej Pasterczyk

To be honest I can releate with this research technique. I almost automatically reject anyone trying to sell me something having the assumption that they don't care that much for my benefits as for their own profit. These days you can find lot's of different opinions on the net fairly easy for example:

http://blog.beolle.com/2014/01/research-around-jira-vs-tfs.html

https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Has-anyone-evaluated-Rally-Jira-81065.S.256038212

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/208439/how-to-evaluate-moving-to-team-foundation-server

Personally I find Atlassian products better for my purpose, but they both have pros and cons. The main argument for me is that TFS is just huge, bloated I would say - it does everything, it grown over many years, it was built to follow strict corporate procedures. On the other hand JIRA is more "agile" you can choose different complimentary services (e.g. for source control), there's a lot of plugins to extend it. But I'm sure there are people who prefer TFS over JIRA

If you have any specific questions feel free to ask.

BTW - what was your motivation to consider switching solution?

Balázs Szakmáry

In my opinion it comes down to these questions:

1.: How much of the features of TFS do you use?

2.: How much effort can you spend on maintaining your system.

3.: How complex is your branching model?

If you use e.g. work items, the test server, the build server, the tracking boards on the web interface and/or you don't want to spend a lot of time configuring stuff, it is better to have TFS. (Assuming a not-too-complex branching model and that most of your SW is targeted for Windows)

If, on the other hand, you would use TFS only as version control and you have another build server and a separate issue-tracking system, or if you have version control needs which go beyond the capabilities of TFS, it is probably more beneficial to use Git served by Stash or sg. else.

Andrzej Pasterczyk

Well, right now TFS can also host Git repositories so point 3 may not be valid

Balázs Szakmáry

True. The main thing is whether you want a centralised, auto-integrated, low-maintenance setup or a collection of more optimal and higher maintenance pieces.

James Barwick

Oh...and custom workflow supporting Kanban for our hardware development group as well as Scrum support.

James Barwick

So, it seems like I have my answer.

Use TFS.

Thanks All! Your feedback has been most appriciated!

James Barwick

One of the reasons I chose Bamboo of Jenkins was the linkages between Jira and Build versions with Jire "Release" building. Perhaps I could do this with Jenkins. I don't know. But it seemed better to start with an integrated product.

Andrzej Pasterczyk

Yes, you can integrate that to some level with plugins

https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/JIRA+Plugin

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.marvelution.jira.plugins.jenkins

If you ever decide to try Jenkins make sure you use LTS version, regular releases are often not stable.

Alexey Zimarev2

Andrzej, I checked first two of your links and found it mostly outdated. The first link points to some very incomplete evaluation of Atlassian stack by someone, who is very much Microsoft-oriented (they chose Jira though). Statements like "Jira is just a issue tracking tool" and ignorance to Confluence, Jira Agile, Jira Capture, Jira ServiceDesk, Stash and so on it just unprofessional. The second link is full of comments where people don't know what they are talking about. Cannot create relationships between user stories and tasks in Jira - what a nonsense! A complaint that Jira spring planning is not allowing to plan the capacity shows a misuse of Sprint ideas where you plan in story points for the whole team. whilst TFS pushes you to plan per person, in hours. If yo still want to do this in TFS though - Tempo Planner has excellent support for this. For me, TFS is a very limited solution. Starting with its product backlog item layout that is hard to customize, the way links are shown, where in VS the first links you see are changesets and tasks come afterwards (complete nonsense) and in the web UI the sorting is reversed (and yes, you cannot change it). Only one Kanban board for everything. No search at all. No content management. Build server configuration is extremely complex. No work logs and timesheets. Lack of plugins. I can continue for a very long time since I have years and years of struggling with TFS.

James Hanley

Alexey, You may be right on the nonsense of someone saying that they "Cannot create relationships between user stories and tasks in Jira" but I interpret that as the process was not intuitive and obvious. Any type of tool (Jira, Rally, ScrumWorks, or TFS) should facilitate firmware/software's efforts, not hinder it. I've used Rally in the past and hated it compared to ScrumWorks. Now using TFS, I find myself wishing I was using at least Rally. The excuse for using TFS was it's customization and templates, but every upgrade was painful due to the customizations so the corporate edict is that they will only use the out of the box templates and so far it feels like I'm using MS-SQL server or MyPHPAdmin directly - can't even make a simple burndown chart. The point is - the tool should alleviate engineering effort, not create new nor hinder efforts.

orlando

If you use visual studio and target Windows systems VSTS or TFS is a no brainer.

You get coverage for the whole dev lifecycle including infrastructure with azure services without having to jump between products from different companies. It is flexible, customizable, has a REST API to interact with pretty much every feature at any time in your lifecycle tasks, integrates with microsoft's products.

I wouldn't discard the fact above for not liking certain default presentation or workflow.

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