Here's a brief account of my two-week long experience with Git/YouTrack vs 6 months of TFS.
The new stack feels a lot more lightweight than TFS. Both installing (we tried the on-premise TFS shortly) and using TFS gives the sense of a very heavyweight enterprise suite for no reason. This is partially an illusion that the UI design gives but it seems that with YouTrack:
- Takes less clicks to do anything and even less if you learn some shortcuts and how to use the commands.
- It's easier to navigate between the views - there are less of them but give a better overview than TFS. This is not because they present more info - in most cases they present less info - but because they give the key information in a visually clean way.
- The ability to run ad-hoc searches in YouTrack makes such a big difference! In TFS you have to create a query with a UI that tries to makes it easier but ends up making it harder for you than just typing the query params. I mean, we are developers after all.
- I've enjoyed the local commits of Git and how pull requests work to integrate work from other people into a main branch vs merging on TFS.
- TeamCity has also been very lightweight to use - though I have no experience with CI on TFS. Having said that, it's an area I didn't delve into much because I was already spending a lot of time managing TFS.
Hiccups and things that I miss from TFS:
- It's a little harder to manage releases with YouTrack or I haven't figured out how to do it effectively. The management and separation of product backlog, release backlog and sprint backlog is easier on TFS.
- There's no way to plan a sprint based on capacity of developers - I believe JetBrains is working on that though.
- You gotta pay for a private Git - though YouTrack/TeamCity are free and full-featured for a few users.
I'll try and keep this up to date as I go.