It seems like Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) is starting to get a bit more traction. I’ve been using it for several months now and find it to be a pretty good solution, at least for those of you doing .NET development. This posting is essentially a summary of the various TFS presentations I’ve given over the last few months.
TFS Overview
TFS is a separate solution from Microsoft for complete application lifecycle management. It is tightly integrated with Visual Studio 2005 Team System, but does not actually require it. If you are not using VS 2005 Team System, then you need to install Visual Studio Team Explorer which is basically just an extremely lightweight version of Visual Studio 2005.
None of TFS features are revolutionary. The big thing that it brings to the table is that each of its features have some level of integration with each other.
TFS Features
TFS has the following main features:
- Project Management
- Work Item Tracking
- Source Control
- Build Server
- Reporting
The following sections give a brief overview of each feature.
Project Management
With TFS, everything is done within the confines of a project. And each project that is created follows a specific “methodology”. Included with TFS are two methodologies: Microsoft Solution Framework 4.0 for Agile Software Development and Capability Maturity Model Institute for Agile Software Development.
Everything in the entire project (work items, source control, builds, reports) can be accessed from within Visual Studio (or Team Explorer). In addition, TFS also creates a web-based project portal for each project for easy document and report access. The portal uses Microsoft Sharepoint, which also allows you to enable document versions.
As we’ll see below, TFS is integrated with both Microsoft Project and Microsoft Excel.
Work Item Tracking
Work Items are discrete pieces of information about your work. By default, these work items are included with TFS, but you can create your own as well: Bug, Risk, Quality of Service Requirement, Scenario and Task.
Work items are fully customizable. You can add your own fields to any work item type, you can hide fields you don’t use and you have complete control over where they appear on the form.
Work items can be linked to Source Control Change Sets, Project files, Excel files and Builds. The linking with Project and Excel is especially handy. Essentially, you can populate your Project or Excel file using a Work Item Query. Then you can edit and make changes to work items (or even add new ones) and then publish those changes back to TFS. This allows you to collect a bunch of Task work items together in a project plan or to just collect some subset of Bug work items in an Excel spreadsheet.
Source Control
TFS Source Control is integrated within the Visual Studio 2005 IDE. If you are not using Visual Studio 2005, then you can just use Team Explorer to manage your source code or you can use the Microsoft MSCCI plug-in with your IDE of choice to connect to TFS. I’ve used the plug-in with Visual Studio 2003 .NET and it works pretty well.
Source control has a concept called “Checkin Policies.” These policies allow you to set, on a project-by-project basis, specific rules that must be followed when code is checked in. The default policies are: Code Analysis, Work Items and Unit Tests. For example, if I enable the Work Items policy, then when a developer tries to check in code they will also be required to associate the checkins with at least one work item. This can be a great way to link work that was done with what was actually changed. The Code Analysis policy will run the Visual Studio 2005 static code analysis on the code and only allow it to be checked in if it passes. The Unit Test policy will run Visual Studio 2005 unit tests on the code and only allow the checkin if it passes.
When you checkin multiple files at once, they are grouped into an atomic package called a “Change Set”. These Change Sets are linked to builds as well see in a moment.
A unique feature to TFS Source Control is Shelving. Shelving allows you to check code into source control but to not put it into the current tree. It really just puts it on the shelf. This is a great way to make sure that code is always in Source Control even if it is not quite ready to be officially checked in yet.
Lastly, for those of you that work remotely, TFS Source Control also includes a Proxy Server that caches source on your own local servers for better performance.
Build Server
TFS includes a separate service you can install on your build machines so that TFS can automate your builds. When using TFS Build, you can initiate a build on the build server directly from Visual Studio 2005. Because TFS is so integrated, a build knows which Change Sets it is including and if you’ve associated work items to your checkins, knows which work items were included in the build.
In addition, TFS Build can also run unit tests and static code analysis to help you gauge the quality of your builds.
Reporting
TFS uses SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services to manage its reporting needs. It includes many built-in reports and you can create your own reports using Visual Studio 2005. These reports can then be published to TFS so that others on your team can use them.
The reports themselves run from Visual Studio 2005, Team Explorer or the web portal.
Visual Studio Team System
I’ve written another post here on all the various flavors of Visual Studio, so I won’t go into that again here.
Cost
I also won’t go into specific pricing, but TFS is not necessarily cheap. There are few things to keep in mind, though. If you have a MSDN subscription, you can use TFS Workgroup Edition for free. This edition allows for up to five users to connect to TFS. TFS Standard Edition is a separate purchase (up to about $3000), but you also need to buy client access licenses (up to about $500) for anyone that needs to connect to it that does not already have a license to a Visual Studio 2005 Team edition. And of course, you can always try the 180-day trial.
Does TFS make sense for you? It depends. I think if having all these things in a nice integrated package is important to you, then you should definitely strongly consider TFS. If not, then you can probably get the same overal functionality for less money by picking up solutions from different vendors.
My company, LogicalVue Software, can help you to evaluate TFS for your business.
, but that’s the way it goes.
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