Ask HN: Alternatives to TFS

2 points by 11thEarlOfMar ↗ HN
We're in need of the standard tool set for our software development. The team is small (6) and very senior and has been getting by for years basically with each engineer working in isolation. The company has new goals for growth and this approach clearly will not scale. So before we try to bring additional engineers in, I need to establish a respectable process and tool set.

Ideally, I'd like to introduce a unified system that covers all life-cycle activities from Requirements to Release (we're not a web server company, so dev-ops is not needed). Unified simply because I'd like to minimize the amount of inter-product integration and version management we have to suffer. We're lean. Well. Chubby, mostly, but not much time for a lot of tool set administration.

Team Foundation Server appears to have the features we'd need, but we're not a Microsoft house, mostly 'C', with a sprinkling of Python and TCL. The interesting bits are:

- source code management - reporting (I assume that means bugs/feature requests) - requirements management - project management (for both agile software development and waterfall teams) - automated builds - lab management - testing and release management capabilities

Thanks for any suggestions, recommendations or insights you can offer.

3 comments

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I've only used TFS for its kanban features. I was shocked at how unfeatureful, ugly and obtuse it was. I don't have a suggestion for an alternative, but based on what I've seen, if it's forced on you you can use it, but if you can you should try hard to find something else.

I think it also does source control. I'd hope that was better than the kanban part (because that's actually important), and I'd really hope it was not a descendant of Visual Source Safe.

please check out the Atlassian products (Bitbucket, Jira Software, Confluence, Bamboo) https://www.atlassian.com , you can try each product individually, and/or all these products work together really well.
We have quite a few of our customers move from TFS to the Atlassian suite. We'd welcome you as a customer! Please try them out.

Cheers, Scott CEO, Atlassian