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")