TFS hosting and Urban Turtle

Source control is a critical issue for any software company. After exploring many different scenarios and products we have decided to use Team Foundation Server (TFS). This is a product by Microsoft designed specifically for source control and team management. Since we have team members in Seattle and Manila we decided to go with a cloud solution. After a careful search we found the Praktik Group (http://www.praktikgroup.com) right here in the Puget Sound area. The team at Praktik has been extraordinarily helpful and we have had excellent response times to any requests.

In addition to TFS for managing source code and software builds we are also using a plug-in to TFS called Urban Turtle (www.urbanturtle.com). The Praktik Group automatically setup Urban Turtle for us and we simply started using it. Gotta love the cloud! Urban Turtle is designed for the type of software methodology we use for development called SCRUM. I will be posting more about SCRUM in the future but in a nutshell it is an iterative development process designed to center around user needs and team commitment.

At this point we have our source control system flowing and are checking in, checking out, branching solutions, and managing the entire solution development process using SCRUM methodology and Urban Turtle. The initial iterations took some time as everyone came up to speed with this setup but now that we are in a rhythm our sprints are on a roll and we are advancing our solutions at an ever increasing pace.