Loosing the battle, but the war goes on

TL;DR

A personal account of challenges promoting TFS over Jira and Subversion, highlighting adoption barriers, team dynamics, and efforts to bridge tools via integration projects.

19 July 2007
Written by Martin Hinshelwood
2 minute read
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Well in my current war to get my company to use TFS , I am loosing the battle for Visual Studio Team System adoption. I have fought many battles, against Jira, Confluence and Subversion, but they are currently wining. I cant seam to get the Architecture & Strategy guys to get behind the project. They are sitting on the sidelines encouraging me, but with no active participation.

Time and again I am running up against the problem that no one will read any of the content that I have provided. It is difficult to fight a battle on many fronts and the fact that Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server is such an excellent product with complete integration between all of its services is actually not working in its favor.

Others are able to concentrate on selling Jira to one group of people while others are concentrating on selling Subversion. I have to lobby them all…

The call has now come down from on high to have all Risks and Issues stored in Jira. This will cripple the effectiveness of my arguments as the best arguments for the business revolve around Work Item Tracking, as they don’t really care if the developers can link their source code to tasks, or test results to Releases or even bugs to Change Requests.

Thus, I have created a CodePlex project for TFS Work Item Tracking to Jira Synchronization  in the hopes that some enterprising developers would be interested in working on the code. I will not have time to work directly on the code as all development projects are now being outsourced to our Indian development team or to external companies, and I have been relegated to the bench of release management  documentation…

Technorati Tags: Fail  ALM  TFS  VS 2005

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