In our company lately I'm busy with TFS and Scrum.  Also my colleague Bart is busy with these items.  So we decided to joined together for a serie of posts about the different Scrum templates in TFS. This article will also be crosspost on the Ordina blog. So let's start with the first post of this serie.

What is Scrum?

A definition by ControlChaos.com:

Scrum is an iterative, incremental process for developing any product or managing any work. It produces a potentially shippable set of functionality at the end of every iteration. It's attributes are: 

• Scrum is an agile process to manage and control development work. 
• Scrum is a wrapper for existing engineering practices. 
• Scrum is a team-based approach to iteratively, incrementally develop systems and products when requirements are rapidly changing 
• Scrum is a process that controls the chaos of conflicting interests and needs. 
• Scrum is a way to improve communications and maximize co-operation. 
• Scrum is a way to detect and cause the removal of anything that gets in the way of developing and delivering products. 
• Scrum is a way to maximize productivity. 
• Scrum is scalable from single projects to entire organizations. Scrum has controlled and organized development and implementation for multiple interrelated products and projects with over a thousand developers and implementers. 
• Scrum is a way for everyone to feel good about their job, their contributions, and that they have done the very best they possibly could.

Scrum naturally focuses an entire organization on building successful products. Without major changes -often within thirty days - teams are building useful, demonstrable product functionality. Scrum can be implemented at the beginning of a project or in the middle of a project or product development effort that is in trouble.

Scrum is a set of interrelated practices and rules that optimize the development environment, reduce organizational overhead, and closely synchronize market requirements with iterative prototyes. Based in modern process control theory, Scrum causes the best possible software to be constructed given the available resources, acceptable quality, and required release dates. Useful product functionality is delivered every thirty days as requirements, architecture, and design emerge, even when using unstable technologies.

What is TFS?

Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server is an integrated collaboration server for Visual Studio Team System. It combines team portal, version control, work item tracking, build management, process guidance, and business intelligence into a unified server. It allows everyone on the team to collaborate more effectively and deliver better quality software.

Scope.

This document describes the advantages/disadvantages between several Scrum templates that can be used on VSTS 2005.

Used Scrum templates.

So this was the first part.  In the next part, we will talk about the installation process of the different templates.  So stay tuned.

Your TFS Scrummasters

Bart Wullems and Sven Cipido