TFS Team Project Collection vs Team Project

Question

I am working on new development effort (ASP.NET 4.5) and trying to create TFS space for it.

This effort is managed separately from any of the existing projects and is the first project of the series that will be done at a later day.

From TFS perspective which is the better way to go:

• create a new TFS Team Project Collection and then a Team Project for this and all subsequent projects
• or just create a new TFS Team Project using existing Collection.

What are the benefits of one or the other? When is a new Team Project Collection warranted?

If we just create TFS Team Project will we achieve the necessary separation of projects so that check-ins on this project don't trigger builds on other projects, Bug reports on this project will not be affected by other projects, separate Work Items maintenance, etc?

We use TFS 2012.

Answer 1

You can create a collection for all projects that relate to a particular code base, or you can create a collection for each business unit in your organization. As per your question there is no code reuse. More over you are emphasising separation. Using a new Project collection is the best option for you. Project collection have their own hardware and DB. Which means there is complete separation between the two and no sharing of code or workitems and also separate permission(think working for another company).

And for comparison with single project collection, multiple project collection is scalable + easy to outsource. The catch is you would need a controller per project collection(existing controller cannot handle the new one). Hence another build agent. This is the relationship: 1 Project Collection->1 Build Controller -> multiple build agent. More here

Having said that 90% of the clients I come across can easily live with a single project collection :)