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Microsoft has released new support for the Scrum method of agile development in its eScrum tool.
eScrum is a Web-based, end-to-end project management tool for Scrum built on the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server platform, Microsoft said. Scrum is an agile method for management of software development projects.
Microsofts eScrum provides multiple ways for developers to interact with their Scrum project—eScrum Web-based UI, Team Explorer, and Excel or Project, via Team Foundation Office Integration. In addition, eScrum provides a single place for all Scrum artifacts such as product backlog, sprint backlog, task management, retrospective, and reports with built-in context sensitive help, Microsoft officials said.
In a blog post about eScrum, S. “Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsofts Developer Division, said: “Many development teams inside Microsoft are now using the agile methodology for software development and had been looking for a way to track their daily progress. Some of the product units in Developer Division are also using this methodology. A team within Microsoft decided to build a Web-based tool on top of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server for just this purpose.”
Microsoft began using that tool internally, but then decided to make it available outside the walls of the corporation as eScrum, Somasegar said.
“Seeing the excitement and adoption for this among internal teams, our services folks—Microsoft Consulting—wanted us to make this available broadly to our customers,” Somasegar said in his blog.
Robert Galen, principal consultant at RGalen Consulting Group LLC, Cary, N.C., said Scrum “comes from the rugby notion of the scrum, which is to have the entire team get together and huddle, and then break and do their individual tasks.”
Galen said a typical scrum team is made up of between five to 10 people, although there could be more. The team then works in Scrum “sprints” of about 30 days to complete a particular task or set of tasks for a particular milestone.
Meanwhile, eScrum 1.0 is available on the MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network).