I work in a small dev team of seven people. I manage at any one time two or three developers and what Visual Source Safe (VSS) doesn't offer me is a way to track what these developers have worked on. This is important to me for three reasons firstly as a sanity check when something goes wrong and I quickly need to check which team members worked on it. Secondly as a productivity guage that shows how much code has been added or updated by a developer, this is a blunt instrument but if nothing has changed then this is a sure fire way of discovering your developer is surfing the web all day ;) .Thirdly to facilitate code review for team members.

Essentially what we need is an audit trail that can be reviewed on a developer basis. The reason (I'm guessing) this functionality is not present in VSS is because it is not built on top of a relational database like Sourcegear's product Vault and not designed to support source code control for a team like ours. I am just about to evaluate Vault .

I have already blogged about Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) pricing as have many others and I have read a lot of developer blogs that indicate VSTS is not aimed at teams our size either on price or the way roles are individually defined, although as far as I'm concerned the jury is still out on this. If it does turn out to be true it leaves dev teams like ours between a rock and a hard place.