Urban Turtle's blog

Now that the vacations are over and that the 2010 Agile conference has come and gone, Team Urban Turtle is back to work, cooking up another promising release 3.4.

With the release of the Scrum template from Microsoft came a Removed state, making it necessary to propose a recycle bin feature to our users. The next version of Urban Turtle will therefore include a recycle bin icon at the top of the iterations and areas panel. Users will be able to drag and drop items onto it to set the state of selected items to a configured deleted state. It will also be possible to view deleted work items by clicking on the icon.

The team is also working on a select / unselect all option to flag or unflag all iterations and areas as favorites in one click.

We have several more interesting features in our backlog, some of them coming from customers who voiced their opinions and proposed suggestions on our community-powered support site. Thank you all for your support and keep those suggestions coming!

} Dom

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Two weeks ago, Urban Turtle announced its brand new partnership program. The partners are a select group of consulting firms who mastered the ins and outs of Scrum and are friends of the “Turtle”.

To provide more details on each of our partners, I follow the series of blog posts with the firm Readify.

Founded in 1999, Readify has established itself as certified experts on the .NET Application Development Platform within Australia.  They have office in Melbourne and Sydney and provide expertise around system architecture, application lifecycle management and user experience design using the latest Microsoft platform technologies.

In 2009 Readify introduced its projects offering known as DevPods. DevPods are based on a team-orientated project delivery capability which combines a high performance development team using an agile methodology (specifically Scrum) and focuses on close customer involvement to successfully deliver projects.

Readify is one of Australia’s young and savvy IT business success stories. This year they received the Australia’s 2010 ‘Best Places to Work’ award.

Mitch Denny, Chief Technology Officer at Readify explains why they appreciate Urban Turtle:

“If you plan to use Scrum with TFS, we recommend Urban Turtle instead of Excel-based planning workbooks”

You can learn about their offerings relating to Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) here. Do not hesitate to consult their website.

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The Urban Turtle is at Agile 2010 with its fourth release in four months since the Visual Studio 2010 release in April.

During the opening night, the turtle spent some time flying!

We are also kicking off a fun contest to win an Xbox with the Kinect module.

If you are in Orlando, come by the booth to get a sticker, stick it on an unusual place and upload it to the contest page. If you are not in Orlando you can also participate. Download a sticker here. Do not hesitate to vote for the photo you prefer at Urban Turtle fan page.

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Some members of the Urban Turtle team (Francois, Dominic and Mario) are at the Agile 2010 conference this week.  If you attend the conference, please come see us Wednesday or Thursday at booth 128 in the exhibit area.  We will be more than happy to discuss and to demonstrate the latest cool features of Urban Turtle such as the real-time burndown chart.

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There will be no rest for our team during the hottest months of the year. Today, we launch Urban Turtle 3.3. This new version includes an hour burndown chart along with some ergonomics, navigation and performance enhancements.

Real-time Hour Burndown Chart. Now with TFS Basic!

Will we be able to respect our engagement? Every Agile team wants to answer this question fast and with certainty. To answer this question, there is no better tool than an hour burndown chart. Based on remaining hours of work in the sprint, the most accurate type of burndown chart is now available in Urban Turtle for your Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 projects.

Click the “Burndown” button, Urban Turtle reads the sprint Start Date and End Date from the Sprint work item type (which you can easily create with Urban Turtle) and shows you a chart based on real time data. In other words, our report is based on the work item repository and does not need the TFS warehouse and Reporting Services to be installed and configured. This feature is therefore available on every instance of Team Foundation Server 2010, including TFS Basic.

New Feature: Work Item Types Filter

The planning board now displays a button bar that allows users to filter the cards displayed.  Different views for different roles; your Product owner could now focus on the Product Backlog Items, your Scrum Master on impediments and the team… on Tasks. Each work item type used and configured in your project can be selected and this feature is available for all process templates.

New Feature: Persistent Settings
Urban Turtle can now retrieve the last iteration and area that you were previously working on. No need to re-click the same old links before the daily anymore. Just sign in and Urban Turtle displays your favorite view of the backlog.

We recommend that everyone upgrades to this latest version and we are eagerly awaiting your feedback. Let us know what you think on our community-powered support site!

If you attend the Agile 2010 conference, do not miss the chance to see a demo in person of these cool features. Come meet members of the Urban Turtle team at booth 128.

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Urban Turtle is pleased to announce it is partnering with a select group of training organizations offering the Professional Scrum Developer (PSD) program. These organizations are Accentient, Pluralsight, Pyxis and SSW. Partnership involves a credit promotion for Urban Turtle and visibility of partner’s classes.

Professional Scrum Developer courses teach students how to turn product requirements into potentially shippable increments of software. Scrum traditionally avoids providing guidance for engineering practices. This course fills that void by addressing what developers do with the remaining 7 hours and 45 minutes of their day after the daily Scrum meeting. Classes are exercise-driven, where students work in teams and develop “done” increments from product backlog items. Each class is five days long, and classes can be either public or private.

All Professional Scrum Developer courses cover three main topics:

1. Scrum. PSD courses cover Scrum Fundamentals like Scrum roles, artifacts, and timeboxes. The course simulates being part of a Scrum team to expose students to these concepts in action. Students learn how to work as part of a Scrum team, which requires them to understand techniques for self-organization. At the end of the course students develop skills in identifying and eliminate typical types of Scrum team dysfunction.
2. Tools. PSD courses teach students how to leverage different development tools to employ Scrum practices. PSD .NET courses are taught in the context of Visual Studio 2010 using the Microsoft Scrum process template and add-ins such as Urban Turtle. Students learn how to map specific tool features and functions to the general Scrum practices they must use to be effective team members.
3. Practices. PSD courses cover all of the technical practices that team members need to successfully implement and ship functionality. These include coding practices like test-driven development, continuous integration, and refactoring; architecture practices such as emergent architecture and evolutionary database development; release management practices like planning, requirements definition, and deploying, and quality assurance practices from defining “done” to pair programming to version control to acceptance testing.

Aaron Skonnard, founder of Pluralsight explains why they joined this Urban Turtle initiative:

“Any initiatives that eases adoption of proven engineering practices with Microsoft technologies will always gain support from Pluralsight”

We asked Adam Cogan, Chief Architect for SSW and Microsoft Regional Director, who teaches the PSD .NET course all around the globe, what his thoughts on Urban Turtle were. He said:

“Mario one of the high value take-aways the students tell me they get, is seeing some of the great third party TFS tools in action. That’s why I ensure I demonstrate Urban Turtle, so they see Team Web Access providing awesome value, and it eases adoption of Scrum with the Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum process template”

Then we have Richard Hundhausen, Accentient’s president, who in cooperation with Microsoft and Ken schwaber, created the Professional Scrum Developer .NET training course says

“I has not yet met a certified PSD trainer who did not want to be listed as a friend of the Turtle”

When registering students for a PSD .NET course to get up to 100% off your Urban Turtle license cost, all you have to do is register for one of the training sessions listed here http://urbanturtle.com/?item=professional-scrum-developer. Make sure to mention your Urban Turtle license when registering. Your discount will be applied to your training fees. For more information on the curriculum of the Professional Scrum Developer program visit http://www.scrum.org/psd-net-syllabus/

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For those of you planning to start a new project with the Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 Process Template, Mickey Gousset just write a good paper in the Visual Studio Magazine. He introduces the new Microsoft Scrum 1.0 Process Template for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server and steps through the installation process.

http://visualstudiomagazine.com/Articles/2010/07/27/Installing-Scrum-Process-Template.aspx

Urban Turtle 3.2 fully supports the new Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 Process Template. Using the index card metaphor with drag-and-drop functionality, it is the perfect replacement for Excel-based planning workbooks.

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Urban Turtle is pleased to announce its brand new partnership program. The partners are a select group of consulting firms specializing in “Agile” ALM with TFS. Not only are they friends of the “Turtle” but they are true professionals who mastered the ins and outs of Scrum.

In the coming weeks, I will publish a series of blog posts to give you more detail on each of our partners. I started this series with a first partner, the firm Northwest Cadence.

Northwest Cadence is an American consulting firm located in Kirkland, Washington.  They consult, coach, and train organizations to help them perfect their software development processes. They orchestrate the cadence between technology and teamwork to ensure organizations get triumphant results. Through a focus on team capability, Application Lifecycle Management, and optimal tooling such as Urban Turtle, Northwest Cadence is here to make you a winner and keep you smiling.

Steven Borg, founder of Northwest Cadence explains why they appreciate Urban Turtle:

“Urban Turtle dramatically reduces the tool friction involved in adopting agile with Team Foundation Server.  By clearly removing a significant agile adoption blocker, Urban Turtle helps teams ‘get’ agile more quickly and adopt more successfully.  I’m currently recommending Urban Turtle to all our clients adopting agile.  It eases the transition and teams love it.”

You can find an engaging compilation of Technical Tips, Knowledge Expansion, ASK SME, and Event Highlights by subscribing to their monthly e-newsletter. Do not hesitate to consult their website or read their blog.

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One of the main orientations is to build Urban Turtle into TFS (as opposed to integrate with). All our design decisions are made to bring as much value-added as possible while creating a seamless experience for existing TFS users and grow with TFS as Microsoft adds new features.

If you are interested about the details of the three releases we have made since the Visual Studio 2010 launch in April, please read the following posts:

1. April 30th – Urban Turtle 3.0 RTM is now available!
2. June 4th – Urban Turtle 3.1 now available!
3. July 8th – Urban Turtle 3.2 now available! – Support Visual Studio Scrum 1.0

We believe this orientation is what allows us to have a product that installs on the server in less than two minutes and gets a team to use it right away. We are very interested in hearing your stories and get your feedback about how we can further improve the experience.

Help us make our Urban Turtle a Chameleon

Also, our tight integration in the Web Access user interface makes the user feel at home and perceive TFS with new capabilities (as opposed to using an extra product). This is a big plus to have a smooth user adoption. We know that adopting scrum is already an interesting challenge; you do not need tools to get in your way but be a possible accelerator.

Again, give Urban Turtle a try and let us know how we succeeded in turning it into a Chameleon.

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Team Urban Turtle is again proud to announce a new release: Urban Turtle 3.2. This new version features support for the Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template from Microsoft, along with filtering of iterations and areas.

Support for Visual Studio Scrum 1.0
Urban Turtle 3.2 fully supports the new Scrum template from Microsoft from the get-go. This post introduces the new features that have been developed for the template, but I strongly recommend that you take some time to read this previous entry to understand the reasoning behind them. Most of these features can be configured to work with other process templates.

New Feature: Approval
Product Owners can now approve PBIs with a single click when looking at their backlog in the Planning Board.

New Feature: Commitment
We made it possible to commit to PBIs contained in a sprint with a single click, again from the Planning Board.

New Feature: Sprint Details
We’ve made it easy to create and access the Sprint work item through the Sprint Details button in the planning board’s iteration list.

New Feature: Favorite iterations and areas
As Dom mentionned before, we have been looking at ways to reduce the number of iterations and areas visible at any time. We’ve come up with a great idea which actually is not our idea at all. I mean, favorites is anything but new in software! Basically, you can now easily switch between viewing all iterations/areas where you can flag some of them as favorites, and then hop back to a view where only favorite iterations/areas are displayed. This effectively reduces the number of work items displayed at once and helps you focus on the task at hand.

Once again, we recommend that everyone upgrades to this latest version and we are eagerly awaiting your feedback. Let us know what you think in our community-powered support site!

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