JIRA vs TFS 2012 as full ALM system
we are on the research level of choosing a full ALM system for our company. we consider both TFS 2012 and JIRA for use in product, project managment, QA, support and developemnt teams departments. the things to support are bug tracking, workflows, project graphs (such as bugs count, burn down and so on). any recommendations? pricing? as far as i can see TFS is better for R&D teams using visual studio and less for eclipse.
Answer
Here are TFS advantages:
- TFS is an application life-cycle management (ALM) solution, but Jira is simply an issue tracker. Many features of TFS, e.g. source control and automatic builds are not supported in jira and you should use other solutions, e.g. Subversion or Bamboo to this aim.
- All TFS components, i.e. source control, issue tracker, build automation are fully integrated. Such level of integration cannot be attained on other solutions.
- It is fully integrated with Visual Studio.
Here are Jira (and other Atlasian Solutions) advantages:
- It has been used in MANY open source projects, e.g. JBoss, Spring, etc.
- For launching TFS, you need a high end server, MS SQL, etc. But Jira could be installed on an ordinary PC on open DBMSes, e.g. my SQL.
- If you are using Java technologies, many Java IDEs, e.g. IntelliJ, Eclipse and Netbeans fully support Jira. I have not seen such a nice support for TFS.
- There are lots of plug-ins available for Jira. You can take a look at them here.
- If your team is small, Jira costs only $10. It is really cheap.
- Atlasian solutions have better support for java technologies (Ant, Maven, junit, etc.)