I finally was able to complete the installation of TFS and started the creation of my first team project which introduced me to the process template.
After following to the link to Microsoft's site for process template information I was inundated with new information to consider. What templates have all of you had experience with that either worked out very well for you or were more of a stumbling block to the project? What were the biggest advantages and disadvantages you've encountered?
Some information about my project, I'm the lead developer for a small company and will be using TFS/VSTS to create an intranet portal to consolidate the end users day to day and increase automation to enhance productivity etc. It's entirely new development taking advantage of C#, ASP.NET and SQL Server 2008.
Ideally I'd like to take advantage of features to enhance collaboration with the stake holders to help add desired features and to track the status of development and offer feedback etc. I was also looking to take advantage of JetBrain's TeamCity for my TFS so if any specific template / software really adds cohesion between TFS, TeamCity, Developers, and Stakeholders that would be ideally what I'm interested in.
Are you already using a software development process like scrum? If yes you can try this Team Process Template over here.
How large is your project team and the project? Microsoft has published one of it's internal Process Templates (MPT) over here. You can get some guidiance and inspiration from this template.
As tangurena mentioned. People use the standard templates, change the bug a bit and store some documents there. I would recommend to keep the process 'light' as well.
However the process template isn't all.
Here are some ideas what I would do (in your case):
Create some high order workitems (features/stories) which stakeholdes can create (constraints and TFS user groups are your friend). They can then access their requested features via the TFS Work Item Web Access. That way you don't need a CAL for them
Create some reports which show planned work accodring to releases.
Setup the build automation and create Reports (a.k.a. Release Notes) from your workitems according to the builds.
What were the biggest advantages and disadvantages you've encountered?
Imho the biggest disadvantage is that you start believing that the template is your silver bullet. It's not, it's your starting point.
The TFS ecosystem offers you alot opportunities to create own bits of software that fit your needs. Just check out the TFS API.
Here is another nice agile-based template (original is on SSW, but you have to get around a login wall).
This template helps enhance cohesion between developers, managers, and other stakeholders by including more robust support for project process (documentation, reviews, &c., &c.). For example, there are types built in for process elements like release plans.
In general terms, I'd favour as small a process as you can manage. The more states, the more fields you have, the more likely the information in them is just plain wrong.
We're running with our own version on the Agile template. Most of what we did to it was delete stuff.
You can use the TFS API to log builds into the database, which should enable you to bridge TeamCity and TFS. Other than that, I'd probably just go with the web interface that comes with TFS, I don't think you need third party software for this.
K.I.S.S.! I created a custom work item based off the Agile one. And thats it, just one work item. There is a "System Severity" that IT uses and a "Business Priority" that the client/customer uses. There is also a "Request Type". With those three along with the built in Area and Iteration the entire team, including the clients can query the work items to get only the items they care about for the release they are concerned with (or all of them regardless of the release).
I did not modify the state machine much at all. This left us with something that is very flexible for everyone. Everything from blue sky requests to the mundane content/visual bugs can be logged there.
The client uses TFS Web Access (unlimited CAL) and the devs (me and 1 other) use VS. At my last job I created the same setup, the dev team was a team of 5 and it worked even better there! I was dev lead there as well and technical PM.
The biggest advantage was having a very flexible system for everyone, when using 1 work item type for everything. The disadvantage would be a learning curve for the client, but once they knew how to use it most like it. A suggestion would be to look into cheaper tools out there for a similar implementation, but, our .edu discount with MS cant be beat.
I would have to say that you must identify the system you will use for your company's SDLC first. The process template is merely a tool and without a good understanding of the underlying process it will not help and can make things more difficult. User adoption is crucial to the success of the SDLC and process template.
We use Scrum for Team System. We chose this due to our experience with Scrum as an SDLC methodology. There are several excellent books and articles on the web to help you get up to speed. Scrum will tie together the business stakeholders into the process.
In our system the Product Manager is in total charge of Product Backlog Items and works with myself and the CTO to prioritize them into Sprint Backlog Items.
The only change we have made to the process template was to add a "Failed Test" state and corresponding workflow.
It might not be the best template for you but I still wanted to mention it here: XP for Team System. It is basically a simplified version of MSF for Agile Software Development:
[...] it removes some of the setup tasks that an XP project will probably not want to undertake and changes the Work Item Type name Scenario to Story.
Related
I have a project with 4 teams handling different parts of a fairly large web based system. What would be the best way of handling this in Jira and Jira Agile?
One project and board per team or is there another way of organizing this in Jira Agile?
Read about using components but since I'm fairly new to Jira Agile I don't know how to do that.
If many team are working on different part of the same system, I suggest you create only one project. From my experience there is a lot of chance you will want to move 'items' from one team to another or link two items that are related but not handle by the same team.
Like previous posts mentioned, GreenHopper is just an (agile) plugin that help you manage items in JIRA, allowing to display and manage them in different ways. The plugins is especially useful if your are following a development process like Scrum.
With the last version of the tools I was able to easily share a single 'backlog' of work to do between multiple teams and then 'assign' items to a specific team when it's time to work on it. When planning for the next Sprint, for example.
Of course having a clear view of your process is key.
I think you are confused about a few things, which is understandable for somebody new to the tool.
Jira is the software you are using and Greenhopper is an external company that produces plugins for it, mainly the Agile plugin. Components are within Jira and they are simply a way you can categorize your issues. I suggest you find a tutorial video on jira to introduce you better to the tool.
Now, again, these are just tools. They don't dictate how you should work. Jira is very flexible that way so you can do Agile, Scrum, Kanban or whatever methodology you want within it.
You need to first decide what methodology/process you will adopt. Basically, how will you guys work?
Are all the teams working in sprints? Do they have the same deadlines? Are the stories-issues parts of a whole or can each team deliver a full feature on it's own?
For example, if one team is infrastructure, one is UI and one is DB, their parts will likely come together to make a "whole" feature, that is complete and tested.
Another example is if team A is doing a Reporting Module and team B is doing a Login module, their features aren't usually related and they can work separately.
So basically, you can't ask anybody here to give you the straight answer. Stop focusing on the tool and understand how you will work and what makes sense for you.
And remember: agile is trial and error. Try something and if it doesn't work, adapt.
What are some of the models/methods (best practices) to promote code between environments? What kind of models do you use?
What are some of the models/methods (best practices) to promote code between environments?
A good place to start looking is looking at the Microsoft Team Foundation Server Branching Guidance: Code Promotion Best Practices. This version is for 2008 but will get you started in understanding approaches.
From there, take a look at the Visual Studio TFS Branching Guide 2010. Download the TFS_Branching_Guide_2010_Complete_Package. Inside you will find a variety of diagrams/documents that will assist you in deciding how to best approach code promotion.
What kind of models do you use?
Our company model varies from project to project due to the complexity and release model. In all cases though we have separate branches for each release/hotfix and a main branch which acts as the pulse of our application "A build that should never fail." From there though we use a variety of approaches- some using a Review WI before promotion, others a bit more free in the promotion process. All that to say, based on your scenario and goals you will find your approach adjusting to fit those needs.
I am currently creating a business case for rolling out TFS 2010 as our source control and bug/release management tool.
We currently use OnTime for our bug tracking software and subversion for our SCM.
I was wondering what advantages TFS 2010 has over OnTime?
I have done some thinking so far and would love to hear responses:
TFS 2010 allows linking changesets->work items->builds
TFS 2010 provides greater customisation of workflow than OnTime
TFS 2010 is integrated into the Visual Studio IDE - This requires less apps to be open and less window flicking
Thanks in advance.
TFS is one of the least intuitive Version Control systems I have ever had the misfortune to have to use. It may have numerous "bullet point" advantages over OnTime (and other comparable systems), in terms of raw feature-lists and capabilities, but the key factor is whether it can fit in with your working processes.
My experience with TFS is that you will be required to adapt to the TFS way of working, because adapting TFS to your way of working will be impossible or too difficult to justify.
We recently reviewed a number of possible alternatives to replace a system comprising SVN and a manual bug-tracking system (Excel spreadsheets). On-Time was evaluated but deemed too expensive and complex.
In the end we opted to continue using SVN, but drastically revised (simplified) our repository structures and chose to combine SVN with the FogBugz issue tracking system. The integration between these two systems was fairly rudimentary "out-of-the-box", but required only a little effort on our part to achieve the much closer level of integration we desired. Certainly far LESS effort than my previous experience of a TFS roll-out involved.
Our SVN/FogBugz system is also now integrated with a FinalBuilder build automation suite.
The result is a system that not only fits our working practices perfectly (since we devised the means by which the systems would integrate to achieve that) but which is also infinitely adaptable as our working practices evolve.
I think that it really depends on the size of your team(s), and what you want out of source control.
I used bugzilla in combination with Perforce for a couple of years and found that both were really very good at their own individual things while working in a very small team (2-3 people), but the suffered from a lack of integration between them and from some little idiosyncrasies that took time to get used to.
I recently moved to a new job where TFS is used extensively. There are 4 main teams in this company with 10-12 developers in each, split into further project teams below that level, and it is in this kind of environment that TFS really shines imo. It's biggest advantages in my view are:
1) The integration with Visual Studio - it's not just a case of having less windows open, but it really does speed things up and make your life easier. Things like VS automatically checking out files for you as you work (no issues with accidental checkouts due to lockless editing), being able to synronise local + TFs builds, being able to quickly compare the local version against previous ones..yes you can get 3rd party plugins to integrate but none to this level and with the same stability.
2) The communication features - simple things like integraton with Live Messenger (provided you configure TFS correctly) are great for large teams. We use WLM to communicate accross the office and for collaboration as its just quicker than walking over to someone else every time you need to ask a quick question.
3) Linking builds/changelists to tasks - Yes other SCMs do this but again it's just done in a very nice, integrated fashion..I guess it's nothing special to TFS but personally I like how it tracks this.
4) Ease of merging/lockless editing. I've had experience with some other merge tools and the TFS one works nicely enough, making merging after concurrent editing pretty simple. It's very similar to perforce in this respect, but also with a usually pretty effective auto-merge tool which I use for tiny edits that I know cannot cause any potential issues with edits other developers are working on.
5) Auto building/build management. Working with a couple of large solutions containing 20-30 projects that depend on each other, this is a godsend. We have it set to queue up a build every 20 minutes IF something has changed, and when one has happened its listed in the history log..so easy to see when you need to update your local libraries.
I don't have any experience with configuring it other than build management, but I have heard that this is the worst part of TFS..that its a bit of a pain to get everything running correctly.
So, translating that to a business case..I'd say that if you are a Microsoft software house with large/multiple teams, then the time savings and productivity improvements that you will see as a result of the above features are worth the investment in setting it up. Its free to use in most cases as you will probably have a MSDN subscription (maybe some CAL issues but i'm not sure) so your biggest cost will be in user training and configuration.
Firstly, I would suggest to consider what is your primary concern, what is the problem that you are tying to solve by rolling out TFS.
In terms of version control I would recommend the blog post from Martin Fowler on Version Control Tools and a follow up results of a version control systems survey. Admittedly this might be and is a subjective view of the subject but one that seems to be pretty popular. TFS clearly looses in comparison to other Version Control Systems.
I currently work with TFS2008 and we have migrated from SourceSafe and IBM ClearCase/ClearQuest and there is no doubt that TFS is far better then any of the previous tool, still it has its serious shortcomings and the new version will only partially address those.
Addressing the individual point you have raised:
TFS allows to link builds with changesets and work items, but so many other systems
I have not used OnTime but the workflow customisation can be both an advantage and a hindrance. Potentially, there might be a lot of work involved in creating a custom process template and you would still need a sensible UI on top of it (Team Explorer or Web Access might not be sufficient)
Integration with Visual Studio is an advantage but there are add-ons to Visual Studio that allow integration with other source control providers
On the advantages of TFS I would probably mention
Distributed builds and separate build agents - if you do many builds
Full integration with Visual Studio via the Team Explorer
Extensive reporting infrastructure (though you can only take full advantage of it when using MSTest for all the testing)
SharePoint collaboration site for each project
Given the substantial cost of rolling out full TFS installation I would really consider what real business benefit would this solution give you that others don't.
Not shure about TFS, but the UI of OnTime is kind of non intuitive.
Also I dont like that you have different fields for Bugs and Tasks. Of course you can always add your own fields, but the default layout should be ready to use.
We endet up using only "Bugs" even if it is a task.
I dont say its a bad product, but if TFS has a better UI for bugtracking now (which it hadnt 4years ago when I had to use it and hated it ), then this would be an argument for TFS.
Sorry to hear that you want to get rid of SVN. Thats a hard decision.
I'm not sure about the licensing for the Axios OnTime but if you have an MSDN subscription then it's no additional cost. See the blog post here
I've been using TFS 2008 only for version control and while it's a nice upgrade from VSS some things that we're tyring to do aren't exactly in line with what is expected. That said, I've written a quick little web app that fills in those gaps. It was pretty easy to develop against using the API and there's lots of addons to help with specific tasks.
Probably not the answer you want to hear, but I'd be doing my damnedest to make a business case against TFS.
In any event, my general advice would be to try it out yourself (or in a small team) on some very small, but real project - maybe some tool you need on a once-off basis, code that can be thrown away or easily migrated to another system because it's small. There's nothing like actually using the system!
I have used OnTime and Subversion. I have not used TFS as bug tracker, but I've used it for source control. The source control part of it is basically still the bad old Visual SourceSafe. If you are currently using Subversion you will be swearing your head off any time you need to rename a file or, heaven forbid, delete a file and then create one with the same name - never mind any branching or merging. It's hard to convey in a post just how primitive and fragile it is as a source control system - that's why you really have to use it. You'll see what I mean when you find yourself stuck with a file you can neither check in nor delete and some meaningless error. Not that Subversion is perfect - but it's a decade ahead of VSS!
The workflow part of TFS, which I've only briefly played with, seems very "heavy" to me. That is, it really restricts the user to that workflow and requires a lot of steps that are often unnecessary. This stuff can help, but it can also just as easily get in the way. A good system provides the workflow when it's needed, but allows you to bypass it when it would just get in the way. When we used OnTime, we found that even its relatively unobtrusive workflow was often just more trouble than it was worth. Of course, this all depends on the specifics of your situation. How are you using OnTime workflows now and what do you want out of TFS that OnTime doesn't provide?
Linking changesets to bugs can be done with Subversion as well. It supports some extensibility mechanism - I don't remember the details, but FogBugz uses it (we switched to it after OnTime). Linking the to builds can be done by adding a simple svn tag command to your build script. Visual Studio integration can be done with VisualSVN.
The cost is also a huge downside of TFS. It is very expensive for what it does, especially when you take into account how well it does it. Yes, it's "free" if you have to have an MSDN subscription for every developer anyway - but do you have to, without TFS? Subversion is free, full stop. OnTime and FogBugz are far more reasonably priced.
I would strongly recommend against TFS. I once tried to restore the source code from a crashed instance, but I gave up after a few days, so source code was lost (= it failed to do the one thing a VCS should do). Of course, I might have done something wrong, but it's not easy to get everything right when the restore guide is two miles long, and it really is something that should happen so rarely that nobody is experienced with it.
Now I use Subversion/Trac, which gets the job done (and customizing the workflow in Trac is so easy it's not fun, compared to TFS).
For the time being, avoid TFS!
I would stick with SVN + FinalBuilder and then choose between FogBugz or CounterSoft Gemini.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 3 years ago.
Improve this question
I am quite new to Lean/Kanban, but have poured over online resources over the last few weeks and have come up with a question that I haven't found a good answer for. Lean/Kanban seems otherwise such a good fit for our company, who is already using Scrum, but have reached some limitations inside that methodology. I hope someone here can give me a good idea.
As I see it, one of the biggest advantages of Scrum over Waterfall is the use of sprints. By having everything ready every 14 days you get short feedback cycles and can release often. However, as I have understood from reading about Lean, there are some costs associated with this (for example, time spent in sprint planning meetings, team commitment meetings & some problems with finding something useful for everyone at the end of the sprints).
Lean/Kanban will remove these wastes, but only at the cost of not being able to release every 14 days. Or have I missed an important point? For, in Kanban, how can you work on new development tasks and release at the same time? How do you make sure you don't ship something that is only halfway done? And how can you test it properly?
My best "solutions/ideas" so far are:
Don't release often and allow the waste associated with running out of new development tasks. Not really a solution to the question asked though.
Develop in branches and then merge into the main trunk. Makes you have to support at least two branches continuously internally.
Use some smart automatic labelling system to automatically build only certain finished tasks and not others.
As a summary, my question is: When you use Lean/Kanban, can you release often without introducing waste? Or is release often not part of Lean/Kanban?
Additional info specific to my company:
We use Team Foundation System & Source Control and have previously had some bad experiences in regards to branching and merging. Could this be solved simply by bringing in some expertise in this area?
The problem you describe seems more a source control program -- how to separate done features from features in-progress, than about Kanban. You seem to put a heavy penalty on running many branches -- which is the case for source control systems not based around the idea of multiple branches. On Distributed Source Control systems, such as GIT and Mercury, everything is a branch, and having them and working with them is lightweight.
I assume you read this blog about Kanban vs SCRUM, and the associated practical guide?
And, in answer to your question, yes, you can release often with Kanban.
You need to understand pull systems, which is what Kanban is designed to manage.
A customer (or product owner or similar) request for a feature in the running system is what triggers the process.
The request is a signal that goes to deployment. Deployment look for a tested item with properties that match the request. If none is there, you write the tests and look at development if there is a development slot that can be used to implement something that fulfils the test. When development has done its development (maybe looking for a suitable analysis first and so on), the test does its test, and deployment deploys.
The requests going backwards through the system are permissions to start working. As soon as the request has arrived, this triggers a lot of activity, where each activity should be completed as quickly as possible. There you have your turbo deployment.
Just like the request for a car goes to the dealer who looks in the ship who signals to the car factory, who signals to the suppliers.
Kanban is not about pushing requests through a system. It is about pulling functionality out of the system in exchange for a request that enters via the last step.
The team I manage uses Kanban and we release around every two weeks. If you're strict about what gets integrated into your mainline code branch (tests passing, customer approved, etc.), Kanban allows you to release whenever you want. You need to make sure that the stories moving through your system aren't co-dependent in order to do this, but on my team that's usually not a problem - a large part of our work involves maintenance, which consists of several unrelated bug fixes / features per release.
The way we handled weekly releases on a sustained engineering project that used Kanban was to implement a branching strategy. The devs worked in a sandbox branch, and made one checkin per work item. Our testers would test the work item in the sandbox; if it passed the regression tests the checkin would be migrated to our release branch. We locked the release branch from noon Monday until the release went out (usually by Wednesday, occasionally by Thursday, the drop dead date was Friday), and re-ran the regression tests for all migrated checkins as well as integration tests for the product, dropping a release once all of the tests passed.
This strategy let devs continually be working on issues without being frozen out of their branch during the release process. It also let them work on issues that took more than a week to resolve; if it wasn't checked in and tested/approved it didn't get migrated.
If I were running Kanban for a new version of a project, I'd use a similar strategy but group all related checkins as a 'feature', migrating a feature en masse to the release branch once the feature was done and then performing additional unit/integration/acceptance/regression testing in the release branch before dropping a release with that feature. Note that a key concept of Kanban is limiting work in progress, so I might restrict my team to work on one feature at a time (this would probably be several work items/user stories).
There's more to this than just source control, but your choice of TFS is going to limit you. When the Burton project was conceived back in 2004, Microsoft wasn't paying attention to Agile, much less Lean. It's going to be your weakest mechanical link for some time. Your hackles should have been raised by CodePlex's own adoption of Mercurial after having been offered to the Microsoft community as the poster child of TFS implementation.
A more salient issue here is Work Design. It encompasses the order that you choose to implement features (work schedule), as well as prioritization and cost of delay, and the shape and size of work items.
Scrum is commonly interpreted to say that non-technical "Product Owners" can determine work schedule based solely on their own concerns. If you follow this path, you're going to incur a lot waste by not taking the opportunities to do work together that belongs together. Work that belongs together can't just be determined by Product Owner wishes. Technical and workforce (skills) opportunities must also be taken into consideration.
For work to be done in the most productive way, the work itself has to be designed that way. This means that in a Lan Product Development team, decisions are made not by a non-technical worker, but by what Toyota calls someone of "Towering Technical Competence" who is close to the product, close to the customers, and close to the team.
This role is a stark contrast to Scrum's proposition. A Chief Engineer on a Lean team is himself (or herself) the voice of the customer, and the role of Product Owner is unnecessary.
Scrum's "Product Owner" is a recognition of an under-developed role in software development organizations, but it's far from a sustainable solution that consistently avoids waste. The role of "Software Architect" is often insufficient as well, as in some developer sub-cultures, the architect has become far too removed from the work.
Your issues of continuous deployment are only partially addressed with technology and tools. Look also to organizational issues, and perhaps give some thought to Scrum's purpose as a transitional approach from waterfall rather than one that can serve your organization indefinitely.
For source control I'd highly recommend Perforce. It makes branching and integrating changes from other branches relatively straightforward, and provides the best interface for source control that I've seen so far.
Continuous integration helps as well - i.e. lots of small, more than daily commits, instead of huge and potentially challenging merges. Tools like CruiseControl can help highlight when the source gets broken by a bad commit. Also, if everyone makes many small changes then conflicting changes will be rare.
I'd also advice not to try to follow things like lean, scrum, kanban & co. too closely. Just solve the problems yourself, looking to these ideas for guidance rather than instruction. The specifics of your problems will more than likely require some flexibility for the best management.
How we do it:
We have a pipeline with the following stages
Backlog
TODO
In progress (Develop and quick testing)
Code review
Test (Rigorous testing)
Integration test and general acceptance tests
Deploy
Each story is developed as a branch based on the latest version to leave the Deploy stage. They are then integrated as part of preparing the integration test.
QA pulls from the code review stage and can prepare releases at any pace the want. I think we have a pace of roughly one release every week.
By removing the "master" branch from git and not doing any merge before the code review stage we've made sure that there is no possibility to "sneak" code into releases. Which, as an interesting by-product, has forced us to visualize a lot of the work that used to be hidden.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
We've had several sprints with the traditional whiteboard and PostIt notes and are ready to move forward to integrating the process into our Team System environment. One tool we're considering is Conchango's "Scrum for Team System" (http://www.scrumforteamsystem.com/en/)
Has anyone tried this tool in a real world scrum process? Was your experience positive or negative? Is the tool worth the licensing fee in your opinion?
We use Scrum For Team System and love it. It really does a good job of merging the TFS and Scrum processes.
We also got the task board (the part you have to pay for) and really like that too.
Even with Scrum for Team System, TFS via visual studio is not good for planning meetings (though it is ok for standups) The task board helps a lot in visualizing the work remaining and in moving it around.
Before we got the Task Board, we would use post it notes for our planning meetings and then enter them in to TFS after. And even though the Task Board is nice, if you don't have at least 2 people working on it in a planning meeting then it is not enough. We have 3 laptops going for a team of 5 + 1 (scrum master) and that works great. If you don't have that then I would still think about doing post it notes.
The task board allows you to refresh and see what the other are entering in. We have one computer hooked up to a projector so that the others can see what is happening. We all then brainstorm like we would on post it notes, but the people on laptops enter the data into TFS.
For us, it works great!
Later Note: If you do choose the Scrum For Team System template then I STRONGLY recommend that you read the Process Guidance. We had to figure out a few thing the hard way before we sat down and read it. Especially on how to handle defects (i.e. when is it a Bug and when it is a Sprint Back Log Item that goes back to "In Progress")
The templates are free. It is only the Task Board Application that cost a modest fee. You can use the templates without the Task Board although I highly recommend using it as wll. I think the biggest advantage for my team has been that the ScrumForTeamSystem tempaltes integrate into VS and provide a seamless feel with the rest of the development environment.
We love the ability to attach the PBI's to check-ins and have them show up on the Daily Build report.
If you are are missing something you need, you can fire up the VS template editortweak the templates to your liking. For us, we added a "Requested By" field and a "Testing Status" field to the PBI template.
The 2 shortcommings that annoyed us were that the "State" of the PBI's were not the same as SBI's (No Ready For Test on the PBI). We do testing/validation at the feature level and not the task level and wanted to track the PBIs status so we had to add our own custom field. The second issue was that there is no report out-of-the-box for a PBI burndown/up at the Sprint level. So you can't see how you are doing at delivering stories, only tasks. You have to make your own.
We don't really use the "Bug" template much (we ship flawless code:) ). No really, there is no such thing as a bug against work in a sprint; so the only time we record a bug is if a client finds an issue in the production code where it didn't work as advertised.
As Vaccano said, it isn't nearly as fast as a whiteboard or post-its in a meeting environment but if you get a couple people really good at using the tool and a couple of laptops you can make it work.
I evaluated several products and the simplicity and price of ScrumForTeamSystem can't be beat.
Like others have said, beware that the Conchango template handles bugs very differently. The idea that unreleased Backlog Items are bug-free is not just a suggestion; there is literally no way to track bugs affecting the current sprint's work. I found that this disadvantage outweighed the advantages.
If you are searching for an online Whiteboard you can have a look at the Scrum tool Agilo. It was build especially for distributed teams which do not have the chance to work on a "real" whiteboard.
For a quick information you can have a look at this video.
The 3.0 version of the template for VS 2010 changes how the tool models Scrum in ways to very effectively support multi-team projects and the typical interactions one will find in larger projects.
Regardless of version, it is currently my default answer for Scrum projects in Microsoft environments. As mentioned, the task board and the (new) ScrumMaster's workbench are incredibly valuable as well!
We build Urban Turtle that extend the Microsoft ALM platform with an intuitive Web interface and simplify your agile project management. By providing a Task Board and a planning board directly in web access you don't have to synchronize anything. The installation is a simple process. 2 minutes to install on the web access server. Nothing to setup on the client desktop.
Don't take my word for cash have a look at what Brian Harry from Microsoft said about the product :
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2010/10/21/urban-turtle-3-5-released.aspx
Have a look at the website and send me your feedback
urbanturtle.com
Dominic Danis
Product Owner.