Santosh Benjamin

VSTS and Open Source alternatives

I replied to a post on this subject earlier and then decided i'd make it a full blown post of my own. Here are my thoughts on VSTS and open source alternatives. A comparison matrix would probably be a better representation, but i'll wait till i collect more information and then produce one.

Before going on, let me state that I am fully aware that there are many folk in the agile world, for whom a daily scrum and a whiteboard/flipchart (and possibly a wiki of sorts) + an assortment of stuff like Nant, nunit, ndoc etc is enough collaboration and info sharing for the entire project. I respect that (and will probably blog about dev philosophies later) and the rest of this post is not for them. This discussion represents the visual tools driven approach.

I think that for the most part the TS features are mirrored by open source alternatives(MSBuild does have some way to go to get as comprehensive as NAnt/NantContrib) and there isnt an official MS version of CC.NET either (although there are some articles appearing on how to do CI in VSTS). Not sure of what the open source alternatives are for Team Test (load test etc).

However, i think a key selling point of TS is its project portal, integrating VStudio tasks with MS Project and Excel as well as TFS work items, display of bug reports and status directly in the project portal and so on. I dont think there is any open source offering that matches that.

Having said this though, we need to see how exactly this integration is going to pan out. For instance, how low level must your tasks in MS Project be to have relevance to the developer.? and then again, if your tasks are that low level, perhaps they shouldnt be there in MS Project. I believe in planning a project properly and assigning tasks to developers but i prefer to keep them at the use case level or story level rather than down to components or lower. VS tasks are too low level for my taste, although an alert system to notify developers that TODO's and other flagged things are still pending is quite useful.  Earlier, in my company, we had integrated CVS with Bugzilla but now we use SVN and JIRA and they arent integrated.  

Also dont forget that the SOA designer and its extensibility is worth a lot to architects especially as DSLs start to take root in the larger developer consciousness. The SOA designer,deployment designer and SDM is also a part of VSTS (okay, its part of Team Architect  but there are plans to extend this well beyond into deployment packaging, possibly integration with Application Center and so on) , so this has to be factored into the comparison equations. Where is the open source alternative to the designers?

I guess theres a lot more but thats all i could think of for now. Comments and feedback would be welcome. I think we would all benefit (yes including MS) if there was an open source alternative in the .NET world to give VSTS a run for its money which would spur more innovation and improvements in the products. There, I'll stand down from my soap box now.