Team Foundation Server Usage at Microsoft

  • Article

My very good friend, Randy Pagels, recently posted some TFS usage data. You can find the PDF here:

https://www.teamsystemcafe.net/files/TFS%20Usage%20at%20Microsoft%20-%20June%202013.pdf

 

While you are there make sure to look at all the other great stuff Randy has on his blog:

https://www.teamsystemcafe.net/

 

Here is a quick look at the data for folks:

Instances

56

Team Project Collections

500

Team Projects

7,800

Active Unique Users

48,821

Work Items

22,759,417

Source Code Files

234,222,381

Builds Per Month

657,923

Test Cases

4,845,580
Availability 99.83% uptime

 

As you can see we like to “eat our own dogfood” at Microsoft and we use TFS for our development. What you may NOT know is that TFS is used for way, waaay more than software development at Microsoft and at some of my customers. The traditional fallacy is that TFS is used for only .NET development or for only software development—nothing could be further from the truth. You can use TFS to do anything where you want to have traceability and reporting capabilities. Some of the more common uses I see beyond .NET or Java application development is the use of TFS for mainframe development and hardware development. We use TFS, for example, to create the Xbox 360 (and Xbox One) hardware elements such as controllers, Kinect, and so on. So the next time you are thinking of using TFS remember the technology transcends any particular technology and can be used for much more than just .NET development.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2014
    Number of test cases seems to be lower than work items!

  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2014
    ppindia :) Yes that is to be expected. Work items comprise just about everything we do in TFS (including requirements, features, tasks, test cases, etc...) so you should always see the total number of work items be the number of test cases + all the other items as well. Z

  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2014
    I am interested in learning more about TFS being used for hardware development.  Our S/W teams have used TFS and Test Manager for years, and recently our H/W team used TFS and Test Manager on a hardware project.  We had some difficulties using Test Manager for H/W verification.  Can you share the tools that Microsoft used with TFS in verifying hardware?