Doing SCRUM in TFS

I am starting off a new project next week and we are going to run it as a SCRUM project (of course, there is no other way now is there :)) .

Since our team is highly distributed we'll need some sort of support to keep the SCRUM-heartbeat going. Let right now say that having distributed team is not a choice of anyone in the project, that just how it is and we'll have to live with it.

So Team Foundation Server is used at my customer and that is how we will manage the project, code and documentation. We are also going to use the SCRUM-project-template from Conchango.

However this is not good at all in my opinion. You force the team members to update their work in Team Explorer before any Daily Scrum can be held, effective. For the team members that will be just an other place to do time sheets - it wont be done!

Also the GUI (as I've seen it) is not very good for moving things around. It is not agile at all, if you get what i mean. The easy "moving yellow stickers" methodology is completely out of the way and a "update your work items. NOW!" - feeling is there in its place.

However, there might be a way out of this. There is an EpiServer site-template that you can run on top of the Conchango template with might, just might, be the solution. Here it is.

It promises a lot (dashboard with AJAX-support) and if it replicates the brown paper and yellow stickers in a good way - we'll might be able to pull this off. I'll keep you posted.

Keep your fingers crossed.