Joe posted about how to connect Telerik TeamPulse with our TFS Hosting service. What he mentioned but may not have fully stressed in the post was that at DiscountASP.NET, we have adopted TeamPulse to manage your own internal application development process.
We have always had an agile development process with continuous updates of our control panel and intranet, but our process was never really formal. So our CTO, Frank Cheung, made a decision to start using TeamPulse and for our dev team to become more agile in a more formalized way.
The TeamPulse product helps us keep to a scheduled sprint. Nowadays, our team has daily stand-up scrum meetings and uses planning poker. Of course, we are still learning, improving and evolving our agile development processes but for the most part it is helping us gain productivity.
So you may be asking why a non-developer like me is blogging about TeamPulse? Well, I became a fan of TeamPulse exactly because a non-dev person like me can be involved in the development process. And I can contribute to the development process without bogging the process down.
Let me explain.
One of the cool features of TeamPulse is the idea board. It’s an area where I can post an idea, feedback or feature request. What I post doesn’t have to be technical – just the high level idea of something that would be cool to get done. These ideas can be broken down into tasks later by people that are more technical than I am. The project manager can get the various tasks assigned to devs as part of a future sprint.
The powerful thing is allowing me to have a formal place to put down ideas and organize them. Prior to using TeamPulse, I would need to keep a list of ideas myself (and you can imagine many of them just being lost) or I’d email someone about an idea but there was no formal way to track it and no easy way to get the idea into our development work pipeline.
The other thing that I like is getting more analytical insight into our development processes – with information about burndown and velocity. This helps us improve our development cycle continuously.
So being a fan of TeamPulse, I’m also glad to announce that Telerik has agreed to provide our customers with a 15% discount on their TeamPulse product for the month of November. Here’s a coupon code that you can use to get this limited time deal on TeamPulse.
TEAMCOU-QTWUZZ
Remember this coupon is only good until November 30, 2011.
There is also a product on the market called TX Chrono (http://www.teamexpand.com/product/tx-chrono). It is a Web-based TFS timesheet for time reporting that allows to review, approve/decline timesheets according to project roles, create reports by projects/users over a specific period of time and export them to MS Word, MS Excel, CSV (which is very convenient for billing).
TX Chrono is highly customizable, e.g. work item fields (Completed work, Remaining work, Overtime etc.), work item states, role hierarchy and much more. You can also create projects in TX Chrono itself for vacation, sickness, days off etc.
The product is on the market since 2009 and works with TFS 2008, 2010 and TFS 2011 is already in testing for the next release.
Let me know if you have any questions.