Recently I joined an open source project being headed up by Dave Lemphers and Joe Sango (but supported by many minions). The goal of the project is to produce a plug-in for Eclipse (a well known Java IDE) that allows it to integrate with the services offered up by Visual Studio Team System’s (VSTS) Team Foundation Server (TFS).

VSTS is a whole of software lifecycle tool which supports managing of work items, source code control, reporting and continuous integration. The idea behind letting Java developers play is that we might be able to convince them to join the dark side – no, not really. But it will be useful for those organisations that do have significant investments in both technology platforms (.NET and Java) and will allow the teams to work with the same lifecycle management tool.

The beauty of VSTS is that it doesn’t necessarily prescribe a particular process, so organisations can choose “process templates” which best meet their particular requirements. This differs from many tools in this space which try to ram a particular methodology down your throat no matter how inappropriate it is.

Hopefully this clears things up from Cam .