I'm interested in possibly using Scrum with my development team (yes, I know it'll be a little painful to transition over to it). However, we don't have Team System and probably can't currently afford to get it immediately.
What are some possible tools for getting a team up and running on Scrum in a .NET/Visual Studio environment without Team System?
Related note: SVNStats - a java project that creates some pretty cool reports of what happened in a repository over time, gets you some pretty code churn metrics
So MSBuild is the glue that you will kick off these tools at various stages of development, or you can add hooks into events that happen with the source code repository. This is a rough list of tools/apps that give you a one for one on the functionality Team System provides.
Great thing about this list - with the exception of NDepend, all are free for commercial and private use.
I was involved in a Scrum team at my last company, and it really has nothing to do with the development environment. It is a process for developing software, and often there is little technology in using the process itself (though a good spreadsheet tool will help with tracking progress).
So... I would say your worries of tools are perhaps misplaced, unless I am misunderstanding the question.
get a whiteboard
getting started with SCRUM shouldn't require any tools - at a minimum, you will have a planning meeting at the start of each sprint, a daily standup meeting, and a recap meeting at the end of each sprint.
In the daily meeting, gather around the whiteboard and use that to track the status of everyone's tasks and you progress for the sprint.
You will also need to track your backlog for planning - this can be done on paper, on a whiteboard, or in Excel.
Really all you need is a piece of bug tracking software to keep track of hot issues for the current sprint. It could even be a spreadsheet (don't use a spreadsheet). SCRUM is a methodology, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development) and doesn't really require team system so much as it requires good project manager and a comitted team.
@Jason and @Mike_Stone are right. Scrum doesn't involve any tools besides a piece of paper and a pen at the bare minimum. Scrum is much less focused on what tools the teams uses as it is on how the team communicates and works together and with their stakeholders to prioritize and adapt to change.
XP, on the other hand is much more tool and developer oriented, advocating things such as continuous integration, Test driven development, pair programming and the like.
Agile methodologies are very tool agnostic and are very pragmatic in that sense. Use what works best for you. You don't need tool a or library b to be agile.
USe excel to create a nice burndown chart!
For work item tracking, knock up a quick web app to record them, then export data into excel, and manage in there.
I agree. Team System is only a set of tools wrapped inside of an IDE. Visual Studio uses MSBUILD by default, NUnit and any other plugin as selected. The only real value is the methodology plugins like Conchango's, that allows workitems to be prioritized and assigned, and the reports that are generated afterwards.
Daily scrums, whiteboard, excel and discipline is a really good start.
Totally agreed on the comments regarding excel. You're better off starting out this way. Scrum can be a bit of a culture shock if you're coming from a waterfall methodology. Making sure your team understands the philosophy first is way more important than the tooling you choose to make it more efficient.
Scrum just seems to work best when you have tangible things (a sticky note, a piece of paper) representing an asset you're building. It's simple, straightforward, and everyone can get their heads around it. Sometimes, your intent, or work items themselves, get lost or misinterpreted when all your tasks are abstracted by storing them in a database somewhere, especially if the team is new to Scrum.
Right now, my team is doing Scrum with Team System. It's great because we get management and team reports for free. However, and this is the important thing, I think we actually did things faster and with higher quality when we did everything with an old-fashioned corkboard, excel and this template (I love this thing, recommend it to everyone doing Scrum):
http://blog.crisp.se/henrikkniberg/2007/12/18/1197973740000.html
You can use XPlanner for managing resources, managing and monitoring estimations. You can review the estimated time in past for future plannings.
As well with .Net Refer: http://www.scrumforteamsystem.com/en/default.aspx
As others have mentioned SCRUM can be done without any specific tools, but I'm going to throw the Atlassian stack out there. I've used them before and quite liked them:
TFS Basic will be around 500 USD in 2010. This is changing the rules. Add UrbanTurtle and you are all set for SCRUM in Visual Studio