Team Foundation Server usage in Microsoft

In this post you can read about some numbers of TFS usage by Microsoft itself. While the number are impressive, I’m really interested in trends for various numbers , you can read from the first table. Microsoft is a really big company and it is really interesting to see where they are investing time in their projects.

While the increase in Source Code files was 3%, the Test Cases had a massive increase of 24%. This shows the great importance of Test Plans in your project. This increase probably tells us that many resources are spent on creating and maintaining tests.

Another really interesting number is that the number of automated build are more than doubled since January 2013 (massive 118%). And this confirm that in these time Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment are two areas where it worth invest into. If MS doubled the build in 6 month, with all the cost related to maintain them and to maintain build environments, it means that they really gain a lot of advantage from them.

While Project Collections had an increment of 19%, number of Team Projects were reduced by –32%. This probably tells us that it is better to have less and bigger Team Projects than having lots of little Team Projects. This can also be a direct consequence of the introduction of Teams in TFS 2012, that permits you to further subdivide a single Team Project using Teams.

Gian Maria