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by Mark Levison.
Original Post: Subversion vs Visual Team System
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I'm trying to decide whether our development team should wait for Visual Team System or start using Subversion today. I've tried to plough my way through the plethora of information, on Visual Team System, in various white papers, blogs and wiki's. There are no clear statements of the benefits of Source Code Control portion of Team System. When I compare Subversion to Team System I see the following differences
Team System has a shelve feature [1]
Team System integrates with the new bug/work item tracking tool
Team System is fully integrated with VS .NET (we don't need that – we've lived with out it for the past two years [2]
Subversion is available today (vs. second half 2005).
Is there some killer feature in Team System I'm missing?
Am correct in understanding that an MSDN Universal Subscription includes a license for Team System that would allow us to our source code control system on it? Half an answer here: http://blogs.msdn.com/buckh/archive/2004/06/16/157022.aspx
I get this question about Subversion rather frequently lately so I've honed this answer a bit. Here are my top 3 reasons why you should wait for Team System:
1. Team System is about much more than source control; it's a full system to support your software development life-cycle. Beyond source control (which is every bit as powerful as Subversion) Team System has work item tracking, an automated nightly build system, reporting, a team portal, and then we can start talking about dev, test, architect, and project management tools.
As a 10 developer shop, we either have most of this additional stuff (bug/feature tracking, nightly builds, unit tests, integration tests) or don't need it.
2. Do you develop in Visual Studio? Our VS integration is the deepest in the industry. For you, that means that source control is seamless. You never have to leave VS to checkout, checkin, create branches, merge changes, apply labels, send checkin mail, resolve bugs, kick-off a build, review your code churn metrics, etc.
As I already noted [2], we dropped VS .NET integration a couple of years ago. We happily able to live without it.
3. Have you seen our shelving feature? It's pretty neat.
Shelving is cool - but is that the only differentiator? I'm looking for the killer feature that makes it worth waiting. While useful this is hardly world changing.
BTW If were starting from scratch after Team System had shipped then I think this would a very different discussion. My problem: “Is a bird in the hand worth two in the bush“?
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