I recently attended a demo showcasing Team Foundation Server 2008 and now I’m trying to figure out which approach works better for development teams.
Right now our team uses JIRA for issue tracking, Subversion for source control, and we’re considering adding Bamboo for continuous integration. The TFS presentation showed how everything is integrated into one platform.
I’m curious about the pros and cons of each approach. Should we stick with our current toolchain of separate specialized tools, or would it make more sense to switch to an all-in-one solution like TFS? Has anyone here worked with both setups and can share their experience?
What factors should we consider when making this decision for our development workflow?
We evaluated TFS against our existing JIRA/SVN stack about two years back and ultimately decided to stay with separate tools. The integration aspect of TFS is compelling on paper, but in practice we found the individual components felt somewhat limited compared to best-of-breed solutions. SVN with proper branching strategies gave us more flexibility than TFS version control, and JIRA’s workflow customization was far more sophisticated than what TFS offered at the time. The real deciding factor was cost and migration complexity. Moving our entire history and custom workflows would have been a massive undertaking with significant downtime. We did implement Bamboo for CI and it integrated well with our existing setup through plugins. My suggestion would be to calculate the total cost of ownership including migration time, training, and potential productivity loss during transition. Unless you’re already heavily invested in Microsoft development tools and Visual Studio, the disruption might not justify the integration benefits.
honestly we went thru this same debate last year and ended up mixing both approaches - kept jira for tracking but moved to tfs for source control. the learning curve wasnt too bad and our devs actually liked the visual studio integration. main thing is dont rush the decision, maybe try tfs on a smaller project first to see how it feels.
Having managed both environments in different companies, I’d say the decision largely depends on your team’s commitment to the Microsoft ecosystem. We transitioned from a JIRA/SVN setup to TFS about three years ago, and while the integration benefits are notable, there were some unexpected challenges. The unified experience in TFS does streamline workflows, especially for reporting and traceability between work items and code changes. However, we found that each component in TFS wasn’t quite as robust as the specialized tools we replaced. JIRA’s query capabilities and customization options were superior to TFS work item tracking at the time. One major consideration is vendor lock-in versus flexibility. Your current setup allows you to replace individual components without affecting the entire toolchain. With TFS, you’re tied to Microsoft’s roadmap and pricing structure for everything. I recommend evaluating your team’s size, technical expertise, and long-term platform strategy. Smaller teams might find TFS’s simplicity beneficial, while larger organizations may prefer the specialized approach for better scalability and feature depth.