Providing additional support for agile development on the Microsoft enterprise development tools platform, Conchango has introduced Scrum for Team System. The new tool lets development teams use the Scrum agile development methodology with Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 Team System, or VSTS. Microsoft's recent delivery of the Team Foundation Server component of VSTS enabled London-based Conchango to deliver its solution, which had been in beta.

Scrum for Team System is a free agile software development methodology add-in for VSTS, developed by Conchango, in collaboration with Ken Schwaber and the Microsoft Technology Centre UK. Schwaber co-developed the Scrum process with Jeff Sutherland in the early 1990s and is one of the signers of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, according to the company.

The plug-in, which will be available as a free download from www.scrum-master.com, will provide development teams with deep support for the use of Scrum, a popular Agile Alliance methodology, when using Visual Studio Team System. This will mean that the software lifecycle development product will recognise the best practices that are defined by Scrum, and build them into any work and processes conducted by the development team.