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<< How 'e' are you? | Home | Access to Team Foundation Server >>

Loosing the battle, but the war goes on



Well in my current war to get my company to use TFS, I am loosing the battle for Visual Studio Team System adoption. I have fought many battles, against Jira, Confluence and Subversion, but they are currently wining. I cant seam to get the Architecture & Strategy guys to get behind the project. They are sitting on the sidelines encouraging me, but with no active participation.

Time and again I am running up against the problem that no one will read any of the content that I have provided. It is difficult to fight a battle on many fronts and the fact that Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server is such an excellent product with complete integration between all of its services is actually not working in its favor.

Others are able to concentrate on selling Jira to one group of people while others are concentrating on selling Subversion. I have to lobby them all...

The call has now come down from on high to have all Risks and Issues stored in Jira. This will cripple the effectiveness of my arguments as the best arguments for the business revolve around Work Item Tracking, as they don't really care if the developers can link their source code to tasks, or test results to Releases or even bugs to Change Requests. 

Thus, I have created a CodePlex project for TFS Work Item Tracking to Jira Synchronization in the hopes that some enterprising developers would be interested in working on the code. I will not have time to work directly on the code as all development projects are now being outsourced to our Indian development team or to external companies, and I have been relegated to the bench of release management  documentation...

 


posted @ Thursday, July 19, 2007 2:31 PM | Filed Under [ Team System Rant ]

Comments

Gravatar # re: Loosing the battle, but the war goes on
Posted by Keith Rull on 7/23/2007 10:20 PM
I lost the same battle a few months ago but learned to accept the fact my company doesn't want to spend money in new server to host TFS and the the expensive CALs that is tied with it.

Oh well, I'll just fiddle with Subversion till one of the head honchos realize that TFS is a better solution.
Gravatar # re: Loosing the battle, but the war goes on
Posted by Martin Hinshelwood on 7/24/2007 7:38 AM
I feel your pain...
Gravatar # re: Loosing the battle, but the war goes on
Posted by Paul Slater on 7/24/2007 9:24 AM
Martin,

As a colleague, I am equally saddened that the powers that be have gone in favour of the poorer choice tracker.

I am not privy to why Jira was selected over TFS. They may have chosen Jira as it is perceived as User friendly and an out of the box solution. I certainly don’t find it User Friendly and can’t imagine the solution we are faced with came from a box. More than likely the output of an extortionately priced insultancy visit.

They may have taken to Jira because non technical users can add Issues by pressing a button and populating a form. This is also available in TFS but it comes with unnecessary baggage which needs to be dropped.

The fact that everything is an Issue in Jira - yes even Risks are Issues - does not seem to have deterred the herd instinct decision to promote Jira over the superior TFS.

Sadly, the fact remains that until TFS contains idiot-proof, user-friendly, simple, default forms to capture Risks, Issues, Assumptions and Dependencies and provides a simple default set of reports which work at both the project and program level, TFS will continue to please the techies, frustrate the Business Users thus leaving the decision makers to opt for the perceived business benefits of inferior tools.

In a few years, choosing TFS will be a no brainer, until then thanks for the loan of the TFS text book, which I will return. Now where did I put my idiots guide to Jira?
Gravatar # re: Loosing the battle, but the war goes on
Posted by Thomas on 7/24/2007 2:39 PM
TFS has a lot of baggage, Jira is a simple to implement and support. They both have strengths so don't belittle the choices made, solve the intergration problems between.

"...can't we just all get along..."
Gravatar # re: Loosing the battle, but the war goes on
Posted by Paul Slater on 7/24/2007 3:11 PM
For the avoidance of doubt, I have also stated that TFS &quot;...comes with unnecessary baggage which needs to be dropped.&quot;

I am delighted to get along. So much so I am currently struggling to come to terms with using Jira, after spending a lot of time adding reporting queries to TFS and lobbying the Evanelist for User Friendly improvements.

Integration or better synchronisation between Jira and TFS must be worth considering.

Round 1 to Jira.
Ding ding, round 2.
Gravatar # re: Loosing the battle, but the war goes on
Posted by Chad on 3/25/2008 5:06 AM
Be careful with TFS -- it is virtually impossible to restore team foundation server data. I, along with one other developer, have just spent the better part of the weekend (20+ hours) attempting to restore TFS data with no luck (even after multiple reinstalls and a complete wiping of the disk and reinstallation of windows 2003)

It's super-easy to backup TFS -- just backup the SQL server DB and reporting services encryption key. That's one of the attractive features of TFS -- you can back it up as part of your SQL server maintenance plan.

However, try to restore the data and you quickly realize that this is not a robust product.

Read this:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms252458(VS.80).aspx

Then realize that you can't follow those instructions, because something in your system configuration has changed (DNS, domain, user names, etc), so you try this:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms404869(VS.80).aspx

Then get an ambiguous error message: "Failed to read from the registration database" during the reinstall, for which there are all of 2 pages in Google. Now you understand my pain!

best of luck with your project, but tfs is just not ready for prime time -- it's great when it works, but when it doesn't it is impossible to get working again.
Gravatar # re: Loosing the battle, but the war goes on
Posted by Dallas on 5/7/2008 6:34 PM
It's actually not that difficult to perform either a restore or a restore on another machine if you understand the components of TFS and follow the instructions.

I have just completed (one guy) the "Move TFS to another hardware configuration" restore and finished it successfully in under 10 hours, fully functional.

The regular restore method takes 15minutes + the time it take to actually restore the databases.
Gravatar # re: Loosing the battle, but the war goes on
Posted by SM on 8/25/2008 10:42 PM
I am trying to compare TFS Work Items and Jira.
From what I see, TFS Work Items are more sophisticated, easier to create workflows etc. , but you need a CAL or some other way to access them, which could be a problem for us.
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