What's the advantage of RTC/RQM compare to TFS (Team Foundation Server)?
I noticed that in Visual Studio 2012, TFS provides more powerful features than older versions, for example it has Test Manager, which functions similarly as Ration Quality Manager.
Since I am still evaluating which tool to migrate to for my organization, I'd like to know your opinion on which tool is more suitable for me. I'm running ClearQuest now and it might be easy to upgrade to RTC. But TFS is more integrated with some of our projects and people are more familiar with it.
4 answers
Besides platform support, the Rational toolset also includes a Requirements Management tool (Doors NextGen) which IMO is better than using MS Office (Word, PPT, Visio, Sharepoint) for elaborating requirements as TFS requires. The problem is that as soon as you start managing artifacts outside of your team collaboration toolset, the integrations become brittle and if you update the externally managed artifact, the reference to it within your tool breaks (e.g. if you change the name or location of your PPT in Sharepoint, your link to it from TFS will become invalid). If you keep everything as a first class citizen within the collaboration repository (the artifacts can still be edited using the appropriate editors) these types of referential integrity issues are avoided.
Also, note that RTC has a VisualStudio client as well as an Eclipse based client. The latter can support many more types of artifacts than VisualStudio appears to (admittedly, I'm not an expert in the latter). So by using RTC, you get the best of both worlds.
Lastly, the Rational tools have various API layers for extensibility. Not sure if TFS offers the same level of extensibility.
Eric Zhao,
I'm not sure you're going to get an exhaustive response from these forums, maybe doing a Google search for a stackoverflow thread about this comparison would be better since you have a larger amount of users who have been in both environments.
In our company one of the key considerations was OS portability, which I believe TFS struggles with to some degree (this may no longer be true.) Last I looked, for example, even building TFS source on Linux, while doable, wasn't elegant: sharing workspace code via Samba shares or using remote shell calls and secure copies to get code back and forth, etc...
I'm not sure you're going to get an exhaustive response from these forums, maybe doing a Google search for a stackoverflow thread about this comparison would be better since you have a larger amount of users who have been in both environments.
In our company one of the key considerations was OS portability, which I believe TFS struggles with to some degree (this may no longer be true.) Last I looked, for example, even building TFS source on Linux, while doable, wasn't elegant: sharing workspace code via Samba shares or using remote shell calls and secure copies to get code back and forth, etc...
I am in agreement with Alex and reiterating to some degree. It's the ease of traceability you lose with clumsy requirements handling in TFS versus the Rational CLM single logical repository solution. All the artifacts are in one place and not strewn in Sharepoint folders or physically attached to work items. Rational is very open source friendly and can support more than just an MS based environment. This is an important consideration for a lot of larger shops with disparate development groups. I know several companies doing both Java and .Net and RTC plays well with others!