I’ve recently found out an interesting thing about TFS and VSTS. There are several misconception regarding TFS and VSTS, which may result in difficulties with TFS adoption. I’m convinced, that companies that plan to adopt VSTS/TFS to manage their software development lifecycle, should have a kind of TFS training, explaining these misconceptions.

One of them is about Team Foundation Server (TFS) to be just an expensive source control repository. The other, regarding both VSTS and TFS, is saying that they are hard to adopt.

Well, as for the first misconception, it is more about what you are using TFS for. Being an Integrated Process Environment, TFS provides the space for storing and managing everything regarding development initiatives, such as project planning, task status tracking, defect tracking, time tracking, source control, etc. So, in fact, using it just for source control may be expensive. But that’s only because TFS is, a kind of, misused.

Second one, is a misunderstanding that VSTS/TFS is hard to adopt, though the difficulty is mostly about improving software development process. TFS training, in this case, might help to discover how to use this framework to improve the processes, using best practices, such as test driven development, automated builds, continuous build environment, trend information about your project plan tasks,etc.