Rod Paddock

Here's my advice to get a cheap Team System license:

Step 1: Become a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner

Step 2: Get free Team System license

The other big thing Team System does is work item tracking.  You can check in code an associate it with a Story stored in Team System.  Builds also get associated with work items.

I wouldn't worry about that, though.  Unless the team is distributed, use story cards.  If the team is distributed, tools like Rally might be good.  A tool like Rally tends to make process decisions for you that you might not want, so process tools should be as lightweight and disposable as possible.

You're not going to find anything with the level of integration of Team System, but it takes a LOT of work to get the rewards of such a high level of integration.  Highly integrated, but highly coupled.

Add http://trac.edgewall.org/ for work item tracking / bug reporting. And choose CI factory rather than rolling your own ccnet and nant for your own sanity.

WatiN for browser based testing...

Gold Partner don't get team system they get team suite. (I work for a gold partner and we actually in negotiation to get sponsored team system...)

TeamCity from jetbrains for CI is nice to, it is not openSource but the PRO version is now free.

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Did you see this post at codebetter.com

Nant is a great tool, but I have been using Automated QA Build Studio for a couple years now and it's so much better. It supports msbuild and is cheap if you setup a build server to handle all of your automated builds. I believe one license is under $500.

And no I am not affiliated with Automated QA, just a happy customer.

Team City Professional is now free.  Limited to the number of users, but generous

Well, I believe Team System lets you write and perform tests for web applications, which is not somethign you get straight out of NUnit. We use Selenium for that, but be warned, the Selenium tests are probably the most fragile portion of our CI right now (they're the slowest kind of test and seem to have false reds more often than the rest).

I'm not sure if Team System includes coverage analysis, but we also use NCover for that.

HTH,

F.O.R.

Rod,

Good list. You'll need a few more tools to round out the functionality if you're going to replace everything TFS does. If you're only bound by OSS then the list isn't huge. If you're okay with stepping off into low(er) cost alternatives then the list gets a lot bigger.

1. Bug tracker. TFS does this with it's work items as a type, so there are two roads here. You can either use something to track tasks and use a "Bug" type in that system, or use a completely separate system. You can find a list of pure OSS bug trackers here: csharp-source.net/.../issue-trackers. BugZilla is very flexible and OSS (perl/java based) and pretty mature.

2. Work Items. At the heart of TFS is work items and these are just stories, tasks, features, whatever. On the open source front is XPlanner which is Java based and been around for awhile. There are a few free (non open source) ones like TargetProcess (.NET). I posted a Scrum Tools roundup which listed a bunch (OSS, free and commercial) here: weblogs.asp.net/.../Scrum-Tools-Roundup.aspx

3. Coverage. NCover and NCoverExplorer have you covered (heh) here as they're provide excellent reports on this. You'll also want to look at TestDriven.NET (the personal edition is free) which allows you to launch your test code from inside Visual Studio and either invoke the debugger or coverage (which in turn brings up NCoverExplorer). Very nice.

You also might want to check out NDepend as it's a value-added too, but then it's $ (with a free version of course). There's nothing in TFS that does this. For unit testing there are lots of alternatives including MbUnit and even Microsofts XUnit.NET.

That's all you need to finish up replacing TFS. Trust me, I've done this and am doing it right now and it's a good thing.

I have a lot of experience with this so if you want ping me offline and we can chat more. Good luck!

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Not exactly open source, or free, but worth the cost:  VisualSVN.  Which of course, means you'll also need TortoiseSVN.

I'd second Bil's choice of XPlanner.  I have a VMWare image of XPlanner that I use from time to time.  If you're interested in it, let me know and I'll send it your way.

Also, remember that UnitRunner, from JetBrains, is also free.  

Thanks for the great replies.

Hey Tom I would love a copy of that VMWare image to try Xplanner out.

How can we proceed on that ?

Hi,

You can also check out trac:

http://trac.edgewall.org/

Ties in with subversion, has wiki functionality and allows you to track tasks. Combine it with CC.Net and you have a reasonably decent combo.

John

We decided not to use Team System two years ago and replaced it by the follwing tools:

-CI: CC.net and msbuild (instead of using the limited CC.net-Tasks we are using msbuild)

-Testing and QA: NUnit, TypeMock.NET, NCover, FxCop

-Source Control: Source Gear Vault

-Bug Tracking: FogBugz

-Deployment: Wix

We made good experiences using msbuild togehter wie CC.net

Joerg

Hi,

I have done a similar thing in my previous company - built to my mind a substitute for TFS.

I used:

Issue/Bug tracking: Trac

Testing: MbUnit, Rhino Mocks, NCover, Simian, FxCop

CI: CruiseControl.NET with Nant

Sourcecontrol: Subversion & TortoiseSVN & AnkhSvn (Visual Studio integration)

Documentation: sandcastle

Although, this looks like a very decent list and is exactly what a small company would require, when it comes to mid and large development companies, it is often not enough. TFS is so much more than just different components offering some functionaslity.

I dont know any solution that would integrate as well as TFS does with VS and other MS rpducts (like MS project, Office, Excel, ....).  And you have to admit, people - specially business people and project managers use these tools. Also TFS has builtin process support and enforcement - you can have a team project unless you have a process set. It also has tools to adjust the process as the project evolves.Tools need to support the process, the tools are of no use without the process.

Having the workitem as root and being able to situate it with almost anything you do in the process (check in, build, other workitems, ...). Amazing reporting and creating and managing the reports - business people and project managers demand and require these reports daily basis, because they need to make decisions based on this. You can actually have reports that go over several team projects (lets say you have dependant projects or situated projects).

Note, i am not talking about teams of size 4-8 people where everyone normally knows what someone is doing. Theres tons more, to it like API for extensibility, test integration - e.g. you can create a workitem right on the test that failed).

Coming to the price, its not as bad as IBM Rational tools set ;) Its not cheap, but its not too expencive to my mind.

Just my two cents, been in the field messing around as well ;)

I have never had to deal with a business-side person asking for reporting on source-control commits and bug-fixes-this-month.  They look at it once, in my experience, nod, smile, then ignore it.  I've mostly worked in smallish places to date, however.

We've done quite well with TargetProcess, though this does cost more than both Trac and FogBugz.

You can get quite creative with pre/post-commit hooks in subversion if you wanted to, for example, follow a 2-stage commit process in subversion; allow almost anything in a branch, but require that commits to the trunk satisfy FxCop, NDepend, NCover etc rules.  Especially with the advent of svn 1.5.

You'll probably be wanting a wiki, too; I recommend MediaWiki, and, if you're Windows-server based, the Apache package from http://www.devside.net to get you up and running with minimal editing.

The other thing we do is store absolutely all dev environment/infrastructure items in its own source-control repository, so we can have a build server from the ground up with a single checkout.  That, if you haven't ever installed TFS, is rather easier than installing TFS.

sharpforge.org/.../SharpForge.aspx - open source, .net 2.0, C#, svn