Agile Development with Team Foundation Server: Rally and TFS

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Team Foundation Server is a platform for process enactment with a collection of templates including the ones we ship in the box, ones from partners and from the community (See a list of templates at MSDN Process site). These range from MSF Agile template to SCRUM Template to MSF CMMI template and more. I recently blogged about a community project called "Templex" in CodePlex to share process templates or its components. Partner templates fill some key areas in the process/methodology space with solutions such as Conchango's Scrum for Team System, Cognizant's FDD for TFS and IJC's EssWorks. I met several partners and agile community leaders during last year's Agile Conference in Washington DC. These meetings and the many follow-ups have resulted in partners building Team System training and solution integrations. Today, I am blogging about the outcome of one such partnership with Rally.

Rally has built a connection between their Agile Management Solution and Team Foundation Server. This new connection enables traceability between Team Foundation Server source code check-ins and tasks and defects in Rally to gauge progress against work products. This also creates a link between the results of the Team Build and Rally project dashboard delivering a key indicator of code health and quality. There is also add-in to Visual Studio IDE for viewing and updating Rally tasks/bugs from within Visual Studio.

These are some common scenarios that will help the team members that are users of Rally's browser based Agile Management solution and TFS source control and build automation capabilities.

Rally is hosting a web cast on June 25th at 10AM PDT. I will join them in this web cast during which Mark Ringer from Rally will demo these connections between Rally and TFS. Click here to read more and to register for this web cast.

Update: Rally earlier today(6/23) put out a press release announcing this. (https://www.rallydev.com/press_release_080623.jsp)

I will have more information to share in the coming weeks about few other projects that our agile partners and community influencials are working on. We will also be attending this year's Agile Conference in Toronto as a sponsor and are planning a great reception for the attendees. I will post more information about our presence in Agile Conference in the coming weeks. Check back in couple of weeks.