May 02, 2017 | 2 min read

4 Reasons to Move to Visual Studio Team Services

By: John Hauppa

4 Reasons to Move to Visual Studio Team Services

If you're due for a TFS upgrade, have you considered moving to VSTS? As the cloud-based version of TFS, VSTS offers a number of advantages for businesses. In this post, I want to discuss four key reasons why you should consider VSTS when it's time for your next upgrade.

1. Lower Maintenance Costs

As a cloud-based platform, VSTS typically has much lower ongoing maintenance costs than an on-premise solution. As long as you keep paying your subscription, you will always have access to the latest version of VSTS. There are no servers to maintain and no upgrade cycles to factor into your budget.

2. Better Stakeholder Involvement

I'm sure you know how important it is to keep stakeholders closely involved with ongoing projects. When you use VSTS, business stakeholders can log into the platform from anywhere to check the project progress, add requirements and enter bug reports. This increased stakeholder involvement can help projects to succeed.

3. Collaboration Among Distributed Teams

Since TFS 2015 began allowing Git integration, distributed teams have been able to easily collaborate on projects. Developers can write and commit code from anywhere, even if it is not .Net code. Git provides cross-platform source control, so it is easy to understand the development of a product that is the result of a multi-team collaboration.

4. Modern DevOps Features

In my opinion, VSTS is the ideal platform for organizations that embrace a modern Agile/DevOps culture. It has a solid set of features, such as automated build and release with quality assurance, that can massively increase efficiency for everyone involved in the project. In addition to saving time, automation can reduce errors associated with manual processes.

Key Takeaways

In summary, the subscription fees for VSTS are likely to be much lower than the costs associated with owning an on-premise system. As well as being less expensive over the long term, VSTS improves collaboration between business stakeholders and developers, and supports an Agile development culture. To learn more about how you can benefit from moving to VSTS, call DragonSpears.