IBM's RTC and Microsoft's TFS 2010

Question

What in your view are the most important differences?
Need to make an expensive decision...

Information:

• We have both Java and .NET Projects (few more .NET)
• Very interested in project life cycle management.
• Migrating from ClearCase

Answer 1

Both TFS and RTC are CRRM integrated to development environment (Visual Studio or Eclipse): they provide:

• Change Management (CM)
• VCS (Version control system)
• Release Management (RM)

The difference is mainly in their architecture, where:

• TFS provides a server SDK for facilitating integration with Visual Studio
• RTC is build on top of an open-source application HUB able to aggregate any kind of tools (RTC baing the IBM Rational commercial implementation of Jazz)

The challenge in both CRRM tools is to manage the necessary bridge you will have to setup for various legacy tools (like an existing ticket system for instance).

Answer 2

Stay away from Accurev, it is a nightmare, as a developer with personal daily battles with it. Git, Mercurial, Darcs, or SVN are much better choices. As far as all of the "features" of Accurev, you likely won't ever miss them, you'll be too busy swearing.

Answer 3

RTC is Visual Studio friendly, and TFS is Eclipse friendly:

(RTC visual studio integration listed here)

https://jazz.net/downloads/rational-team-concert/releases/3.0

(TFS eclipse integration detailed here)

http://teamprise.com/ (purchased and renamed by MS)

I'd personally rather work with TFS, and I write integrations with version control systems for a living, and have touched both of these systems in a deep way. Ask if you want the details.

If you have a choice in the matter, go with Mercurial. Git is fantastic, but I found the Windows experience lacking. Get a separate bug tracker.

If you have a choice but must have version control integrated tightly with tickets, try http://fossil-scm.org/ - far less pain than either TFS or RTC to setup and maintain, though the IDE integration simply does not exist. But it competes solidly on core features with them in about 1 megabyte of download.

Answer 4

1. TFS doesnt have any support for eclipse or any such editors yet, (they are about to come, but no news yet). So which editor you use for your java projects that matters here. But Microsoft is coming up with teamprise which can let you connect TFS (which can work better for your java+.net)

2. And ofcourse for .net projects, TFS is the best, eclipse support for .net/c# is bad, we are using TFS and am lot happy with 2010.

I think for RTC dont know how much support is there for .net editors (VS or any other you prefer) but with TFS, you can certainly make .NET project work great and you can find Teamprise + TFS to work with eclipse also.