Combining TFS with Jira - any experiences or advice?

Question

Ok, I'm a big fan of Jira particularly the later versions as a knowledge management system to use across stakeholders and development in a corporate setting.

However, I'd like to marry it with the usage of TFS 2010 - does anyone have experience of running both systems in parallel and was it a headache, did it make sense, etc?

The task items of TFS are of course a form of duplication when we look at Jira items of course.

However, finding a good version control system that supports branch and merge from the roots up is the issue. For reasons of corporate policy, TFS looks like the easiest candidate out there to adopt at the present time.

Answer 1

Oh boy, I was researching this heavily a while back.
You will NOT be able to synchronize the two systems, the way JIRA works with SVN. Atlassian thought about integrating with TFS, but actually dropped it from their priority list. There was a JIRA<->TFS migration tool over at Codeplex (don't want to look for it now), but it ceased working.

What one actually wants is to see the check-ins from TFS within JIRA (just like SVN) and that you can associate a JIRA bug ticket with changeset, so the customer can directly see when something will be deployed - and that... not possible. Another great thing would be to synchronize TFS work items with JIRA, so that JIRA is the outward facing bug tracking system and you can use TFS for internal task management... not possible

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Here is the official thread on the Atlassian Forums: Integrate with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (replacing VSS). Last official word (June 2010):

Based on customer demand, we are focusing on git and Mercurial support in the short term. We may revisit TFS support at a future date, but it is not currently planned.

On another Atlassian Front (Bamboo) you have the same picture:

TFS support is currently low on our priority list and unlikely to be implemented over the next 6 month. (from Support for Team Foundation Server)

The same goes the other way around - Microsoft integrating with Atlassian (sounds kind of naughty). I could find one official ticket here: JIRA TFS Integration. Last official word (December 2009):

Thanks for the feedback about Jira-TFS integration. We're tracking the request for an integrated solution on our feature backlog. We are also improving our Migration Tools platform to hopefully enable partners and customers to build integration solutions like this to meet their individual needs if we are not able to immediately provide such solutions.

I love JIRA, but I just hate that the two systems don't run together well. All you can do to synchronize your work items with JIRA is, you guessed it, manual labor.

PS: To answer your question about having the two run together: It does work. JIRA is great for customer contact, because it is "easy" to understand. TFS is great for your team (burn down charts, management overviews, code-centric).

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Edit (2012): Now there have been some improvements:

• TFS4JIRA (commercial / free for personal & non profit use)
• UseTFS (commercial / free for community and open-source projects)
• Atlassian Connector for Visual Studio (free)

The Atlassian Connector doesn't include full integration, but at least you get to see all JIRA issues within Visual Studio and you can comment on stuff and search for stuff. So basically you are only missing code checkins. It is enough for most purposes - otherwise you have the other two commercial choices.

Answer 2

Disclosure: I work for the UseTFS vendor Pigsty.

UseTFS 2.0.1 has just been released and now it does support two way synchronization between JIRA Issues and TFS Work Items - there are some limitations that may be blocking depending on your needs.

I'm not going to praise it's features just wanted to let you know there's something you may want to try.

Update Jul 24 , 2012
Now we support synchronizing issue comments with TFS history entries and TFS2012 (TFS11) - both local and azure hosted (tfspreview.com).

Disclosure I still work for UseTFS vendor Pigsty* :)