Are there any alternatives to Rational Team Concert at the moment? [closed]

Question

we are a team of about 100 developers working in an iterative development style. We are looking for a solution that will allow us to aggregate all development artifacts in one collaborative environment. Rationals Team Concert is bringing a lot of what we are looking for issue tracking combined with project management and soure code management integration as well as reporting.

While Team Concert is bringing a lot of features it is also quite expensive.

Thats why I am looking for alternatives. I wasn't able to find a product which is providing the same functionality so I guess Rational is ahead of other companies in this market.

Do you know of any competitive products? Can you suggest a combination of preferrably Open Source products that could serve us well?

Thanks in advance for your help!

cheers Mike

Answer 1

I guess a Redmine setup plus a DVCS (like Git), combined with eclipse and Mylyn would be the closest open-source alternative to Rational Team Concert.

You still would miss some nice features like instant messaging and stack debugging transfer (the ability to freeze a live execution and transfer it to a colleague), but that would be a good start.

Answer 2

Fair disclosure: I work for IBM. Fair answer: You get what you pay for. There are plenty of open source alternatives. None are as good as Team Concert and I firmly stand behind that. Have your IBM representative do a business value assessment and show you what your return on investment will be if you purchase Team Concert. They should be able to provide you these numbers. Either it makes business sense, or it doesn't. Having 100 developers who aren't working efficiently is quite costly.

Answer 3

Fair disclosure: I'm involved in RTC ecosystem maintenance and I support RTC users.

Fair answer (based on 4.0 and 4.0.1 experience): RTC is too expensive given its quality and performance. Buggy, slow, vulnerable to user errors. Not flexible in maintenance - eg. migrating projects is a nightmare, same as migrating a JTS to another host. It's extremely customisable, which is both its asset and a weakness - you will have to invest in RTC proffessionals who are able to debug and fix wicked "customisations" introduced by users.

I don't know for alternatives. But if this is the state of the art, then - hmm.

Answer 4

You can get very good project management plugins for JIRA such as GreenHopper. JIRA also integrates with CVS and SVN. The overall effect probably won't be a smooth as with Team Concert, but it should be an awful lot cheaper.

Answer 5

Trac with svn (and possibly hudson) will fulfil many of these goals. (all are open source)

This article is a good start:

Using Trac for agile project management