We’ve almost finished the testing phase of our next add-on: Boards. It will give you total control over your boards in Urban Turtle. No more XML editing to make your boards fit your process. Take a look at the picture below and tell us what you think!
With Team Foundation Server 2012, Microsoft finally realized what we all already knew, iterations should have dates! In previous releases, process templates would define special work item types to work around this limitation. It was a work around and it felt like one, although Urban Turtle 2010 had a clever way of handling them. Unfortunately, Microsoft decided that the only information that should be added to iterations were dates. Now, every Scrum team knows that the true commitment they should make is towards a specific goal to achieve during their sprints, and not merely meeting a deadline. A wise man once said that “a successful sprint planning [...] is having a team committed toward a goal that is compelling for them as a whole” and we could not agree more.
On April 10th, Pyxis /studio assisted to the unveiling of the finalists at the OCTAS 2013, a contest organized by Réseau ACTION TI. Dominic Danis, Product Director of Urban Turtle, and Martin Landreville, Pyxis /studio’s vice-president of solutions and products, happily accepted Urban Turtle’s nomination in the “Commercial Success” category.
The world of Agility, more specifically the Scrum framework, is in high demand by organizations looking to improve their software development practices. Urban Turtle is a set of Agile modules for Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server platform. More specifically, it seamlessly integrates with Team Web Access (the platform’s web portal). In fact, Urban Turtle offers teams around the world a set of Agile tools that facilitate the planning, execution, and follow-up of their projects.
Our application of Agile methods allows us to deliver value every month. Here is our objective for 2013: 12 versions in 12 months.
“Since the very first version in 2008, we are working to make software development simpler. After 5 years and 3 versions, we are very proud of all that we have accomplished. I would like to thank the Urban Turtle team members and all Pyxissians who contribute to the commercial success of our product,” says Dominic Danis, Product Director.
“We make considerable efforts to provide value to end users and to improve our product. Urban Turtle is in line with the /studio’s mission, and I am very proud of the work accomplished by the team,” indicates Martin Landreville, vice-president of solutions and product at Pyxis /studio.
The team is looking forward to May 25th to find out the winner in the “Commercial Success” category. We wish the entire Urban Turtle team good luck!
The irony of Team Foundation Server not having any notion of teams per-say in previous releases has not been lost on us. Some of our 2010 customers know that we actually had to come up with our own implementation of such a concept to support the practice of using one Team Project to manage multiple teams. I say some because our implementation has never been quite obvious with regards to its configuration which relied upon creating and maintaining an xml file on the server.
Microsoft, with the release of Team Foundation Server 2012, decided to make teams a first-class citizen of their ALM platform. Teams are actually a subset of a Team Project, each specifying Team Members, Team Iterations and Team Areas. This new functionality overlapped our previous implementation and we’ve postponed adding support for either solution until we decided which one would benefit our customers the best. We’ve always worked to ensure that Urban Turtle feels like a natural extension of Team Web Access, integrating some of its features into our own experience. This played a major role in our decision to implement support for the concept of Teams in TFS 2012 rather than rolling out our own, like we did in our previous release.
Following last week’s post about paper prototype, here is the final result. The “Add a widget” feature for our Agile Dashboard for TFS is now implemented and ready for the next release at the end of this month.
Tell us what you think about it!
The Urban Turtle team wants to inform you that it has found an issue with the installation process for Urban Turtle 4.4.1 which may affect your TFS server if it is uninstalled. As soon as the problem was found, a fix was prepared and is now available for download on our website. It is strongly recommended that you upgrade to version 4.4.2 to prevent any downtime.
We are very sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you. Rest assured that the team has already taken action to ensure that this kind of issue will not appear again. We are very proud of the quality of the software we create and are always looking at ways to improve our development process to maintain the high level of quality we strive for with every release.
The team is currently testing its paper prototype of an upcoming feature: add / remove widgets from your Dashboard add-on. What do you think?
Execs, project managers, Scrum Masters and Product Owners, rejoyce! In the newest release of Urban Turtle for Team Foundation Server 2012, the team has finally implemented the missing third pillar of project management: money. While time and scope are major components of any project management solution, they are hard to make sense of if you can’t tie them to how much money you’re planning to spend, or have already spent.
Urban Turtle 4.4 will provide a way for execs, project managers, Scrum Masters, and Product Owners to follow their budget with the Agile Dashboard Add-on for TFS 2012. New report, new metrics; because Agile is also about money (what isn’t?).
We’ve got images!
Following in the steps of our previous release, the team is proud to unleash onto the TFS Agile world a brand new add-on for the Urban Turtle application platform: the Agile Dashboard. Starting with Urban Turtle 4.3, we’re giving you access to four distinct charts. You’ll find some familiar faces but we have a real treat in store for you fresh out of our team of Agile experts.