A little while back, we covered our top 5 project management plugins for TFS. Since TFS is not just about project management, but also about Agile, this week, we thought of taking a look at the best 5 Agile plugins for the Team Foundation Server. Before you are our picks for the most beneficial plugins.
The Monitor
In the fast moving office life, we crave for some information to be as concise and precise as possible, unfortunately, TFS lacks such overview. Here is where Sprint Monitor from Pedro Pombeiro comes in. designed to be displayed on a LCD screen in an areas where teams meet up to discuss process of the project, it provides key information such as latest build status, remaining workload, average time spent on a backlog item and more. It will help you quickly oversee the project status without getting stuck on the small details.
The ALM manager
Application Lifecycle Management is another important thing for most teams, however, TFS does not prove to be a great assistant in that. The solution provided by InCycle Blueprint is not only great, but offers Agile components. The tool provides an agile based framework combined with a turnkey TFS template. To top it off, it is also equipped with a series of ready-to-use initiatives to accelerate the teams’ time to improvement.
The planner
Planning within development teams can get complicated and a good tool to assist in that effort is often required. A tool, designed especially for developers and that is great in this effort is Axosoft. With the tool release planning, report generation and process improvement is made easy. While you can always keep track progress of TFS work item information from within its interface.
The work item manager
TFS work items are great, but still lack some functionalities we might be looking for. IF you want to get more out this particular feature of TFS, Telerik TFS Work Item Manager and Dashboard can be worth looking at. Amongst the features, you will find work item grouping and aggregation, ability to copy and paste comments, tasks and issues as part of a selected item or individually, iteration planning and more. The tool supports Scrum and Kanban processes for you to choose from.
The two-way integration
Lastly, if you want your Agile plugin for TFS to stay up to date at all times, checking out Eylean Board will prove to be a great. The tool not only provides custom Agile templates, expanded work item details, time tracking and more, but also is based on a two-way integration with TFS. This means that the team members can use either program to log progress with the data updated in both places. Such solution is especially great for mixed teams of developers and non-developers that prefer a clearer interface than that of TFS.
Share your favorite Agile plugins for TFS with us.
