Would you recommend TFS or another continuous integration system?

Question

We have appointed a new team leader to start in the next few weeks. He previously worked with TFS and will probably want to use it for CI. The team is new to continuous integration, so he will take whatever advice he gives. Is there any reason to choose another system, such as CruiseControl or TeamCity, or are the functions very similar? We will use it in an Agile / Scrum environment. Thanks.

Edit

Are the features of TFS 2010 different from previous versions?

Answer 1

I will answer my "convenient" answer by default. If your team does not have strong feelings, and TFS is the technology with which your new TL is most convenient, use TFS. Especially with TFS 2010, it is great for CI.

If your team has any objections, I suggest that you ask them about your reasons and conduct a study to find which is better.

Answer 2

We are a $ 2.5 billion manufacturer of solar products that uses TFS to manage all of our software artifacts. We use continuous integration for most of our projects, and it works great. We also use it in an Agile / Scrum environment, or at least move in that direction.

Answer 3

I used TFS (until 2010) for CI and found that part of the CI of this is an absolute disaster.

TFS works very well as long as you do only the simplest things (fetching, compiling), but as soon as you need to deploy, run tests, update the database, copy files, etc., it will break down a lot. I had to resort to writing weird, undocumented XML configuration files and lots of hacks and work to get it working. In addition, documentation for these parts does not exist. Avoid.

Answer 4

I found TeamCity very easy to install and configure, but it is also very powerful. If you think you need scalability, TeamCity might be a good choice.

Answer 5

TFS does everything you need and is relatively easy to configure and get started with CI. The main problem that people experience is licensing, but if you already have licenses / this is not a problem, you should not have any problems with TFS.

Answer 6

You might want to add Parabuild to your list. This is a commercial continuous integration server. Parabuild is free for small teams. Full disclosure: I am the main developer at Viewtier Systems, the creator of Parabuild.

Answer 7

I would recommend you take a look at Hudson, who I find excellent for creating all kinds of things. We use it to repack up debian packages, C ++ internal tools, Ruby applications, and, of course, Java applications.

It integrates with many other popular tools, version control systems, browsers, bug trackers, feedback devices, etc. It allows you to scale horizontally, adding slave servers to increase throughput.

Creating new tasks is very simple in the web interface.

Highly recommended.

Answer 8

I used TeamCity on several jobs as a continuous integration server. TeamCity integration for Eclipse is very good and prevents a lot of downtime with larger teams.

Answer 9

You can find a list of CI tools, both open and commercial, in the Continuous Integration Tools Catalog