TFS Reviews

Microsoft Test Manager with Enterprise Licensing.

TFS’s test management capability without the expensive licensing has large gaps. Users will be unable to access performance testing and coded UI testing capabilities.

Test Execution will not allow 'on the fly' correction of the test steps that affect the test case itself and not just the run copy of the test case.

Reporting has less depth and cannot report on requirement coverage without Microsoft Test Manager with Enterprise Licensing.

Any improvements would have come on the development side as the organization already had a more mature test management application.

Basic, manual testing should not be only available at the most expensive pricing level. We use many different resources during the testing process, some users only create the test cases, some only execute test cases, and some do both.

Access and permissions are confusing when attempting to include basic manual testing functionalities.

For instance, a user who has contributor and project admin access can end up with no ability to create a test case due to permission level. All users doing any type of test authoring, execution, failure triage or reporting must have the costly advanced permission level.

The ability to export test cases with test steps from TFS to excel, the ability to sync excel changes back to TFS or upload existing excel test cases into TFS. Getting existing test cases in other application lifecycle software into TFS is a finicky, time-consuming process relying on cut and paste functionality.

The ability to see a hierarchical view of user stories with child test cases and the test cases bugs in the backlog

Since November 2016.

There is an issue when selecting multiple test cases for execution or editing that the rows selected are not highlighted in IE 11 and Chrome. There is also an intermittent issue with test modules toolbar icon visibility in IE 11.

I am not involved in this aspect of TFS’ evaluation.

I am not involved in this aspect of TFS’ evaluation.

Yes we are using HPE ALM for Test Management, TFS was purchased to help support the development team

I am not involved in this aspect of TFS’ evaluation.

It's just as expensive as HPE ALM, without many of the features, best used for development tool only to avoid higher costs.

I am not involved in this aspect of TFS’ evaluation.

Test Management is immature for an application lifecycle management tool and it might take a couple more releases and pricing/functionality restructuring.

All TFS features are valuable. We used the full TFS switch.

Our organization used to use Excel sheets to control the projects. We didn't have any indicator, workflows or rastreability.

For our activities, the product is very complete. Automatic tests may need some improvements.

Four years.

No.

No.

It's good.

Yes. The company chose a different solution basically because of the higher cost.

No. The initial setup is very simple.

The complete switch is very good. If you have the budget, choose TFS.

Yes. A lot of solutions (Jira, Redmine, SVN, SVS, Git, etc.).

If you don't have any impediments, choose a Microsoft Solution. An MS solution is totally integrated.

In our company, we develop software applications. With TFS we can manage the whole application lifecycle with a single product, and it is visible for all the team members.

I can point to two basic improvements:

1. The project management. Before TFS, we used Microsoft Project and Excel to manage project tasks and release dates (only the Project Manager could do this). Since we adopted Scrum as a part of software development, we needed an agile tool to perform this task. TFS it is a great tool to manage Agile projects because the whole team is kept up to date with TFS burn down charts, release dates and so on, so we eliminated the need for Project.
2. We can use TFS to perform Continuous Integration, making build operations each night. This increases quality process and prevents code regressions.

Continuous integration in most of .NET developments (web and desktop applications) is ease to configure. But in case of other kind of developments (SharePoint or Xamarin) is not so easy, you have to spend a lot of time making customizations. It would be nice to have some integrations tools for this kind of projects.

I've used it for one year.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

We could find all the required information in Microsoft’s online support (websites, blogs etc.), so I can’t rate the customer service for this product.

We used TFS 2010. We don’t evaluate any other product because we only use Microsoft products.

For our needs, we choose a basic configuration, one single server. In our case it was easy to set up the whole system.

In-house. We have the required people to set up the product on our own, in some cases, it is better to call a vendor team.

The full ALM experience that means you can have all your information in one place. For example having everything linked together – your build linked to changes in source control which link to the work items the prompted the changes in the first place, linked to the tests that were run. This is essential when you work in an industry which requires traceability. However, all this doesn’t detract from the fact that TFS supports and encourages agile ways of working.

The level of customisation on TFS allows you to change any parts of the process to suit any organisation’s need.

TFS replaced a number of separate source control, work item and build solutions that were stretched to their limits, since adopting TFS we have been able to scale the development department without any limits from our tooling.

TFS has aided our agile transformation by providing digital Kanban boards that have enabled teams to be more productive when working remotely from one another.

I have a list things on the Visual Studio uservoice page, but none of them are major. I’m expecting most of the issues we have to the moment to be resolved in the 2015 lifecycle.

I've been using TFS for five years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

I’ve never contacted the official support channels, but I have received support via blog posts and e-mailing some of the public facing people and each time the responses have been excellent. I’ve been quickly put in touch with developers who are experts in the field and had my questions answered or my problem resolved. I have even helped to diagnose and log a bug against TFS that Microsoft were struggling with in VSOnline.

The decision was not mine, but it was based on having a complete ALM solution instead of just a bunch of systems thrown together.

Setting up TFS 2010 was quite complex, as it is an enterprise product, but nothing too complicated, just a lot of reading to make sure all the parts worked. SharePoint was hard to configure, but we no longer integrate them.

• project Life cycle
• Bug tracking
• Creating test cases
• Executing test cases

As i'm an Software Quality Engineer It's a helpful product because you can provide project analysis from scratch and create a requirements document for maintenance. Also, it creates a strong relation between developers and testers that allows communication between them through analysis, design, implementation and testing, tracking bugs, bugs report, sitting severity and priority and discuss each issue with developer acc. to requirement document.

I don't know of any areas that need improvement.

I've used it for over a year.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No previous solution was used.

It was straightforward. You can learn how to do it through self-study.

Complete integration with VS IDE and Office tools: This give us a possibility of high-level automation, thus minimizing human error.

The TFS is not just a source code repository, but a real and complete ALM solution. Among other things, we use it as a ticketing tool. It is a building mechanism, which is really polished and easy to use.

TFS on-premise does not support integration with SharePoint Online. If you integrate it with the SharePoint on-premise upgrade, it can be quite challenging.

We have been using this product more than 11 years, started with TFS 2005.

Fortunately, we did not have any stability problems. In some versions, we sometimes noticed missed alerts on some work items, but nothing else. Eventually those bugs were fixed.

We are using a single server deployment with more than 150 projects and never had any issues. Of course, some pre- and post-installation optimization has to be done like SQL Server, etc.

Since we never had any real issues, we did not need technical support. For advice how to “squeeze” as much as possible from TFS and how to optimize it, there are numerous forums, blogs, etc. The community contribution is very valuable.

Previously, we used VSS, which was nothing but a repository, so TFS was the logical step up. Since we develop almost exclusively on MS stack, TFS as a comprehensive ALM solution fitted perfectly.

We started with TFS 2005 beta and the setup was quite complex, especially because of all the requirements which had to be met. If you used integrated the SharePoint Services upgrade, it was a small nightmare. Along the way, the setup has become less complex and is now quite simplified .

We use a Visual Studio subscription for every team member and the TFS licenses are included. If running TFS on-premise is expensive, maybe you could consider moving to the Cloud and use the Visual Studio Team Services.

We were using VSS, and partially SVN, but both of the tools were just repository. We needed the ALM solution, which integrated into VS IDE, and TFS was the logical choice.

If you are on MS stack, I can only recommend TFS since it’s much more than just a source code repository. High level of out of box automation, integration with Visual Studio, and other tools will make your life much easier.

We use TFS for test management. Our entire project management is done through TFS.

We have our test cases uploaded, and we use it for user story tracking and progress tracking.

TFS is on our client's VMs.

What I like is the backlog management, as it is very easy to track at the feature level and move onto the big level. It offers proper traceability for this and the features. 

As far as queries are concerned, creating, grading, or customizing the queries as a primary requirement is very easy to do. It's a user-friendly interface when working with queries.

TFS has to be more user-friendly. We could have some friendly dashboards, which I feel is missing here, where I can easily plug in the dashboard and use it. 

Part of the test case upload is there, but it's an addon that is not being used at this time.

Creating dashboards is complicated. The dashboard and the customization of dashboards is an area they have to work on. It needs to be improved.

I would like to see improved dashboards with easy plug and play. There should be multiple templates that would be easily and readily available where I can track and create my view.

This is what I feel is missing or needs improvement.

I have been working with TFS for three years.

We are working with an up-to-date version.

TFS is a stable solution.

TFS is a scalable model. If I have to look into large projects, we have multiple agile teams having different backlogs. Having a view on this is rather scalable.

We have approximately 28 users for this current project, and we are using it on a daily basis.

We plan to keep using TFS.

I have not had any instances where I needed to contact the technical support team.

It goes back to our install team and they address the issues.

Previously, I was working with Jira and QC. 

The change to TFS was because our client moved onto to TFS.

TFS is more stable and more scalable. We handling multiple projects using TFS. Usability is good and it's very easy for me to have traceability with a view on everything. 

The setup is done by our customer's IT team.

In our case, it's a matter of plug and play.

In my opinion, I would say that TFS is more supportive of a large enterprise.

There is a lot of information available online.

The suitability of TFS depends on the requirements of the customer. If it is for Test Management, I would say that TFS is a product that they should consider if it's a large organization that has multiple or multi-thread implementations.

Overall, I would say it's fine and I would recommend it.

I would rate TFS and eight out of ten.

Source control, and work item tracking, from user experience, it is very easy to relate code versions with work items, and to track your changes easily from multiple interfaces "Visual Studio, TFS web browser."

Also, the API for managing TFS programmatically is very powerful, you can listen on work items changes by TFS events.

Also, you can easily create, update, and delete work-items from the code itself.

In addition, you can extend Visual Studio IDE by adding extensions that you can use with TFS API, to extend the work items module.

Microsoft provide a full BI solution for reporting , and analyze the TFS data in order to bring powerful reports for top management

Recent changes/upgrades that were made:

-New software processes was added.
-Ability to create custom dashboards for each team project on TFS web browser.
-Ability to integrate with Microsoft enterprise project management tool, which covers the gap between software process, and project management tasks

We implemented the scrum process in our company, and we used TFS as the main tool to manage that process.

We upgraded to TFS 2017, which has a lot of features for SCRUM process that can be managed from a web browser.

For over seven years.

Yes, sometimes we feel that it need more CPU, and RAMs on TFS server, either we implemented the hardware with the product minimum requirements.

No, it is very easy to scale it up.

I haven't needed to contact them.

I used before IBM Clear Quest, which had a very bad interface, was very expensive as they price per user, was very hard to modify screens, no flexibility to extend, and by the way it can only be integrated with IBM Clear Case source control.

TFS also is one license for multiple products "source control, work item, build management, reports" also it integrates easily with other products, by its powerful API.

Also it is not easy to find an IBM CQ , or an IBM CC consultant, while it is easier to find a TFS consultant.

It is very straightforward.

Excellent, especially if you have an enterprise license agreement with Microsoft.

See my prior answer about previous solutions used.

Try to bring the latest version, TFS 2017.