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Microsoft Visual Studio Team System - trusted ALM solution
March 24, 2016

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System - trusted ALM solution

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System

Our development team uses Microsoft VSTS/TFS for a variety of use cases. Some of those use cases include creating/tracking requirements, managing source code across teams, creating test cases, etc. The main business problems it addresses is providing a centralized place for planning, project tracking, and monitoring of all aspects of our application.
  • Excellent reporting/analysis tools - customized dashboards and reports aid in project planning, monitoring, and execution.
  • Ease of use in managing change requests in codebase.
  • Customizable - not a one size fits all solution. Easy to customize to fit individual developer needs as well as overall needs/preferences of the team.
  • If server goes down, you are essentially blocked from development. You can't check out files and edit them until communication with server is re-established.
  • Work must be done within confines of Visual Studio. It doesn't play well with external files.
  • Version control could be improved.
  • Organizing our codebase has saved countless hours of developer time previously spent tracking down latest versions, managing changes, etc.
  • Customization toward developer preferences/needs means happy developers, which in turn leads to productivity on application development.
  • Reports and dashboard analysis give instant feedback on what we're doing well and where improvement can be made.
While Git is particularly useful for offline usage, it doesn't provide the application life cycle management capabilities of Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. Ultimately, that's why we are using MVSTS. In addition, more recent versions of MVSTS/TFS provide support for using a distributed version control system like Git to manage your team application development. So we are getting more bang for our buck in making this investment.
I had to steal this from a blog I read recently on the product as it is a good summary of where Microsoft Visual Studio Team System is particularly well-suited. It is for teams that require any combination of large codebase support, fine permission control and where working offline is the exception rather than the rule.