Is the Subversion 'stack' a realistic alte

Question

I'm evaluating Microsoft Team Foundation Server for my customer, who currently uses Visual SourceSafe and nothing else. They have explicitly expressed a desire to implement a more rigid and process-driven environment as their application is in production and they have future releases to consider.

The particular areas I'm trying to cover are:

• Configuration management (e.g., source control)
• Change management (workflow and doco for change requests, tasks)
• Release management (builds and deployments)
• Incident and problem management (issues and bugs)
• Document management (similar to source control, but available via web)
• Code analysis constraints on check-ins
• A testing framework
• Reporting
• Visual Studio 2008 integration

TFS does all of these things quite well, but it's expensive and complex to maintain, and the inexpensive Workgroup edition doesn't scale. We don't get TFS as part of our MSDN subscription.

Those problems can be overcome, but before I tell my customer to go the TFS route, which in itself isn't a terrible thing, I wanted to evaluate the alternatives. I know Subversion is often suggested for its configuration management/source control, but what about the other areas? Would a combination of Subversion/NUnit/Wiki/CruiseControl/NAnt/something else satisfy all of these requirements? What tools do I need to include in my evaluation?

Or should I just bite the bullet and go with TFS since we're already invested in the Microsoft stack?

Answer 1

I'm surprised no-one's mentioned Collabnet's TeamForge. Its the 'stack' part of SVN for all the bug tracking and other management controls on top of SVN.

It doesn't do requirements management as well as other apps (eg Polarion's Requirements) but if you can trace a requirement as a 'bug' then it'll be fine.

Incidentally, there is Polarion's ALM that is a competitor to TFS - they have a comparison chart on the website. Expensive though :(

The best free alternative would probably be Redmine IMHO.