Yesterday, I presented at the ALM Summit which is an event targeting TFS 2010 and Agile project management using Scrum. My talk was about extending the ALM platform. My recommendation to the attendees was that they should not hesitate to buy 3rd party products (add-on) and extend the Microsoft TFS platform. However, they should make sure that they understand the implication of extending the ALM platform using add-on. In consequence, they should ensure to select according to a list of criteria.
When selecting a 3rd party product, here are some items that should be in your list of criteria:
Features Set
- Does it provides the minimal required features?
Product Vision and Support
- Can I envision a long term relationship?
- Is it a supported product?
Evolution of the ALM platform
- Does it easily migrate to the next version of Visual Studio ALM platform?
TFS Add-on or a TFS connector
- Does it read and write directly in Team Foundation Server (TFS)?
- If not, what are the implications for the warehouse and reporting?
Visual Studio ALM process templates
- Does it work with your ALM templates (Scrum, MSF agile, CMMI, custom)?
Deployment and maintainability
- Which server technology is used?
- Is it compatible with your TFS topology?
- Does it deploy directly on TFS?
- If not, what are the implications for maintainability?
- If so, does it interfere with service updates from Microsoft?
- Which client technology is used?
- WPF or Silverlight or HTML5?
TFS integration
- What are the add-on configuration settings ?
- Does it bypass security?
- Is there an “hidden” operational data store?
- Does it transfer add-on informations to the cube?
Localization
- Is it compatible with the localized edition of TFS?
Why publish this list? Mainly because these are the same questions that we asked ourselves while developing Urban Turtle. Our goal was to eliminate any negative impact. This is why we are convinced that Urban Turtle is one of the best TFS add-on.
