if you're adopting Scrum you'll need to decide what level of tooling you'll use. Are you going to use sticky notes on a whiteboard? An expensive 3rd party solution? My opinion is that If you're just learning Scrum it's worth the investment to learn the tools you're most likely to use long-term.
For general Agile software development I've been completely happy with Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS). When you install TFS plus Visual Studio plus Team Explorer, you get the complete package of document repository, work item tracking, built-in unit testing, scheduled builds, email alerts, and more. There's just one problem. It doesn't natively support Scrum.
A hard-copy Scrum tracking process isn't going to do it for me. In ten years at my current job I've never worked on a fully co-located team who's in the office every day. Hard-copy planning and tracking absolutely works for some people, just see "Scrum and XP from the Trenches" by Henrik Kniberg [PDF]. But it's never going to work for me.
You'd think that Microsoft eScrum would come to the rescue. From the site: "eScrum is a Web-based, end-to-end project management tool for Scrum built on the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server platform." Unfortunately it isn't working for us. The UI is so unituitive - there's no way to view a simple hierarchy of Project\Product\Sprint\Stories\Tasks. Just a couple levels of those would be nice, but I can only find queries against the entire backlog. Our configurations has Areas and Iterations instead of Products and Sprints. And since documentation on the web is quite sparse I'd need to sit down with an expert to flesh it all out.
Conchango is a company that offers a products called "Scrum for Team System". It looks beautiful. It's fully supported. And it costs money. Not an option for me at the moment (edit: see comments).
Many teams at work (including mine) are using an internally developed rich client application to implement Scrum. But part of me wonders - are there really only four methods for implementing Scrum? Hard-copy, Microsoft, Conchango, or roll your own? It feels like I need to read up on the available Scrum tools.
Which leaves me to my recommendation. If you have a small team that meets daily then implement Scrum the old-fashioned way with paper and marker. If you have a team spread across multiple sites and time zones then it's your resources and budget that will decide what you do. Honestly, I really don't want to use Sharepoint lists.
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