There is no better way of describing the origin of Eylean Board than taking it back to the days when its developers were coding other projects. Back then in 2011 the choice of project management tools was still limited and while Team Foundation Server was great for the coding parts of the project, there was a clear need for something else to manage it. Thus with a little Agile inspiration Eylean Board was born to…
It is a given, that most offices use a number of tools on a daily basis. They usually range from your standard mail services to specific industry or field required solutions. It used to take a couple of weeks for new hires to get familiar with all the systems used, but as technology progresses, the learning time has gotten shorter. This is due not only to the improved usability of most of these solutions, but…
Last week we hosted a webinar on integrating and driving value from the merge of Eylean Board and Team Foundation Server. The webinar was focused on integration details, expanding of functionality, advantages of the integrated solution, compatibility, driving value and application possibilities . For those of you that have not been able to join us or simply want to remember the details, here is the recording of the webinar. We hope you will find it valuable and…
Since Eylean Board is more than just a standalone project management software, this time the webinar will focus on the two way integration with Team Foundation Server. We will discuss: Introduction to TFS and Eylean integration; TFS and Eylean mapping tricks; Shifting TFS process with Eylean templates; Integration with TFS online (www.visualstudio.com); Multiple workspaces in Eylean for only one on TFS; Your questions. Register now and find out everything you wanted to know about integrating…
While TFS is a great tool for coding more and more teams are beginning to miss features allowing them to manage projects they are working on. Some crave little enhancements, like ability to track time or manage work item tags, while others want to enhance the tool for agile teamwork and use beyond the development circle. There are quite a few choices for the TFS expansions out there, therefore we decided to narrow it down to 5 of our top picks.
5. The time tracker
Time tracking has never been a focus or a feature in TFS. However, with a growing use of time tracking for various uses, such as accounting, work allocation and others, it has become more and more important for some teams. The simple TFS add-on by the name of TFS TimeTracker is created just for that. The tool integrates with your TFS interface, creating an additional tab for time analysis. This allows the developers to track time easily, control tracking inputs, analyze and export data.
When seeking to get more insight into our customers, we often take a deeper look into how they are using Eylean Board. Some of the most interesting statistics usually come from the TFS users and this time is no exception. Before you are the insights of how our TFS customers are using Eylean, specifically, which templates they are choosing and why.
To get an overall idea of what is happening with Eylean TFS templates, first we took a look into the overall data of the customers. In the table below, the results reveal that between the templates there is no big standouts – all of them are running in similar numbers. A bit higher overall usage is found in two categories – Scrum and Agile. For Scrum, this complies with the overall trend of Scrum user numbers being higher than the rest of Agile methodologies. While the biggest choice of Agile template stands behind teams that are implementing one or several practices at a time and want an agile template that has the basics, but is not too specific in any methodology.
We have recently conducted a survey for TFS (team foundation server) users gathering information about their fundamental needs, likes and dislikes. The results were quite interesting and since good things should be shared, we present them to you.
The survey respondents were comprised of various TFS users – 22% were developers and engineers, 14 % – product managers, 7% – project managers while 57% identified as other, not fitting any category. This is a dispersion of roles we see quite often within the IT industry, were it is also usual for people to have more than one role at a time, therefore not being able to identify with a single role as usual. However, since the respondents were not asked to clarify, we cannot state that this is the case exactly with our survey, simply an assumption of ours that will have to be tested at a later time.
The average team size also correlates to the specificity of the industry with the majority of respondents teams being composed of 20 people or more (50%) and 36% of teams composed of 5-10 people. It is not uncommon to see large development teams working on a project, while another trend is to keep the teams small to ensure better communication and continuous progress. Out of the respondents 64% said that they are not currently using Visual Studio Online, which can seem surprising, given the trend of moving to the cloud. This is however quite a normal number given the fact that a lot of teams still work locally and do not need the added benefits of the online solution.
As you know, besides being a standalone software, Eylean Board offers integrations with other popular project management tools, such as TFS, MS Project and others. By this we seek to enhance the experience and to extend the features available for our customers. Today we want to talk about one more Eylean integration aimed to bring additional value – Visual Studio Online.
Visual Studio Online is a tool mostly used for software development projects. It is based on the capabilities of TFS and extended with cloud services to be made more accessible. While it is a great tool for code sharing, it can still be improved in other areas. Eylean offers a two way integration with Visual Studio Online seeking to enhance the capabilities of the tool in the following ways.
Team foundation server or TFS is a collaboration platform, it covers the entire application lifecycle management. It is mainly used by software developers and it provides the tools to manage software development projects. Its core functions are source code management, reporting, requirements management, project management, automated builds, lab management, test management and release management.
Great majority of software today is built by teams, which usually include project managers, developer, testers etc. To build it successfully, team members need to communicate and to understand what is going on in a particular stage of a project, or how the project is doing overall. TFS is all about helping a team to communicate through the entire application lifecycle management, so why would anyone need to use it with Eylean?
