Agile Development with .NET

A recent survey of a development site (lets call it "FooBar" here, to keep my client undisclosed) positively surprised me: A team of >20 persons in a highly productive (agile & iterative) setting, completely based on (new!) Microsoft tool-chain with Visual-Studio Team Server as the foundation. Forget about the old days, when Visual-Source-Safe did everything to ruin your day (Alain called it source destruction system...)- now its Team-Foundation-Server (TFS) making your day, really!

Until now I was really fond of Twiki/bugzilla/Excel combination to track and manage iterative development, even in non-Java environments. My positive impression of TFS changed that:

• The "FooBar" guys integrated their favorite UML-tool seamlessly into TFS: Whenever somebody changes a use-case or activity-diagram, corresponding features or tasks are created (or updated) within TFS
• The project-internal decision process is mapped onto TFS entries
• TFS handles the complete bug-tracking (sorry to say, Joel, might make FogBugz life harder)
• The iteration-coach can export burndown-charts and calculate development speed based only on TFS data - making that a really agile experience.

So - all that is possible with Wikis, Bugzilla and Excel- but certainly less integrated. I'll get myself a license asap :-)