Urban Turtle's blog

We told you it was on the backlog. We told you it was rising in priority. We told you we wanted to see it included in a future release. We then told you we were working on it. For real even! Well, after years of asking, the Urban Turtle team is proud to present to you version 3.15, including its flagship feature: custom task board columns! No longer will you be constrained to a three-column layout. Urban Turtle has freedom written all over it!

Custom Task Board Columns
With version 3.15, Urban Turtle now reads the column definitions from the configured mapping file and displays the corresponding number of columns. It is actually very simple to add columns, since we’ve retained the same configuration file format as the previous versions. In the previous versions, there were only three column sections in the configuration file and you weren’t able to add new ones. I’m pretty sure some of you have tried this, to no avail. Now, adding a Read To Test column is as simple as making this change to your configuration file:

Your process template must already define a Ready To Test state for this work. The configuration mapping file allows you to map your process template to Urban Turtle features, but it does not change your project’s template. We’ll try to have a blog post ready describing how to add a Ready To Test state to the Task work item type in the Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template. You can however get a head start by reading through this blog post which introduces the mapping files and links to other blog posts that describe how to enable some features in Urban Turtle by editing your project’s process template.

Story Point Burndown Chart
Another oft-requested feature is a burndown chart in story points and we finally delivered the goods.

This new chart is very similar to the Hour Burndown, calculating the sum of story points at the end of each day of the selected sprint, excluding stories considered done, meaning those in the state mapped to the Done column of the task board. The exact field whose sum is calculated is actually the field configured as the Story Points field in the Statistics section of the configuration mapping file.

Duplicate Work Item
The Quick Add feature has proven a hit following the release of Urban Turtle 3.14. We have decided to follow through with a Duplicate feature which allows you to, wait for it, duplicate a work item in a single click! This is especially useful during sprint planning when you need to create common tasks for all your product backlog items. Now you can simply create it once, duplicate it as many times as you need, and quickly move it to their new parent backlog item. Here’s a short video of the duplicate feature in action:

Improved support for lower resolutions
Soon after the release of Urban Turtle 3.14, we started receiving reports of card wrapping issues on the task board. This was due to our strict adherence to our chosen minimum recommended width for Urban Turtle which is 1280 pixels. We quickly decided to remedy this issue in the next release, and we’re proud to announce that Urban Turtle will now play nice with lower resolutions, especially the popular 1024×768 resolution used on many projectors.

This is a very exciting release for the team and we hope that you will agree. As usual, we recommend that you upgrade to the latest version (Don’t forget to refresh your browser’s cache!). I also invite you to voice your opinion on this feature or ask for help on our community support site! We look forward to your feedback.

We’ve sharpened our tools, did a bit of our crazy Agile chemistry and are now ready to announce that we will sim-ship Urban Turtle with the release of Visual Studio 11.

You’ll be able to plan and follow your work with our famous, easy-to-use user interface.

We’ll leak some details soon!

A few customers have inquired about how Urban Turtle handles being set up in a load balancing scenario. I thought it would be interesting to describe the current state of affairs on our blog to share with the rest of world.

When it comes to load balancing, there are some issues that you should be aware of. These are described in the following topics on our community support site:

• Urban Turtle on load balanced application servers?
• Setting up Urban Turtle on multiple TFS app servers.

Scott Hanselman has a great summary of some of the things that you should take under consideration when dealing with multiple web servers. In most cases, the first scenario is really the one that applies to us: Urban Turtle uses an in-process session state which requires a particular load balancing setup to work properly. The problem is caused by client requests (user actions in the application, such as selecting an iteration) being processed by different servers. Imagine that the user clicks on the Planning board tab. This request is processed by Server A which was picked by the Load Balancer. Then, the user selects an iteration. This request is handled by Server B, which the Load Balancer picked because Server A was determined to be busy. Urban Turtle stores the selected iteration on Server B, which Server A is unaware of. Therefore, when the user requests the Hour Burndown, if Server A processes this requests, it will not be aware that another iteration was selected and will return the Hour Burndown for the wrong iteration, causing confusion.

The first solution would be to configure sticky sessions/connections or client affinity. The term used may vary depending on your load balancing application vendor. This basically ensures that all requests from the same client are routed to the same server. Thus, the client always uses the same session state and therefore, the same Urban Turtle application settings.

Another solution would be to use a State Server. This is something that you may already have set up for other applications in your infrastructure, but I wouldn’t know about that. In this scenario, session data is stored in another process, on another server and is shared by all web servers in the load balancing environment. Urban Turtle has never been tested in such a scenario. It requires that all data stored in the session state be serializable and I cannot guarantee this as Urban Turtle was not designed with this in mind.

Here are some links regarding load balancing and session state:

• Load Balancing and ASP.NET
• Understanding session state modes + FAQ
• How to keep user requests on the same server when using IIS NLB?
• Configure a State Server to Maintain Session State (IIS 7)

I hope this helps. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Once again, Team Urban Turtle is quite proud to announce the release of Urban Turtle 3.14. Featuring updated visuals and the ability to fill a backlog or decompose a product backlog item in seconds, we’re pretty sure you’ll be as excited as we are about this new version.

New Design
While strictly an aesthetic update, the new planning and task board design in Urban Turtle 3.14 was also aimed at improving the visibility of the boards when displayed using a projector. The original design, albeit attractive on paper, turned the Turtle into a Christmas tree (actual user comments!) when used in the real world. Even though it has always been a concern for us, we chose to concentrate on developing new features since the 3.0 release. This update was long overdue, and this is why we tasked our web guy, Guillaume, to come up with a new look for the application. We’re very happy with the results and we hope you will be too! We can’t wait to hear what you think about it. It may be disconcerting at first, as with any major change, but given time, we’re convinced you’ll find the new look to be quite easier on the eyes. Can’t go wrong with less eye bleeding, right?

Quick Add
We know for a fact that our users tend to avoid round-trips to the Work Item Editor window in Team Web Access like the plague. And with good reasons! It is painfully slow to render and it forces a planning or task board refresh when closed. This is why we try to come up with features that avoid having to go through this window.

Urban Turtle 3.14 introduces the Quick Add section which aims to make the user story/product backlog item decomposition part of your Sprint Planning meetings an actual joy to do. It allows you to add tasks to a PBI in a matter of seconds, without ever going through the Work Item Editor. Simply type in the work item title, press enter and a new work item appears immediately. What’s really cool about this is that you don’t need to wait for the work item to actually be created in TFS. The creation part is all done asynchronously, so you can just continue to type in work item titles and press enter. Combined with the in-place editing capabilities, creating tasks and setting the work remaining is no longer the chore it used to be.

The Turtle is very excited to show its new colors and the speed it has picked up when creating work items. We invite you to update to the latest version and discuss it on our community-powered support site.

So your project has been going along for a while now and several iterations are completed. Your iteration panel is starting to look a little crowded. Maybe something like this:

You start to wonder about how great it would be if you could hide those past iterations so you can focus on the current and future ones. Lucky for you, this Turtle just happens to be wearing a sweater (this is Canada after all) and its sleeves are full of tricks!

There are two possible ways to hide older iterations. The Favorites feature (the stars that you see on each iteration) is the most obvious one to use. Simply click on the star for each iteration that you wish to hide, turning the star grey. Then, click the Apply Favorites button to only show the selected iterations (the ones with the yellow stars). This also works for areas.

However, there is one caveat that you should be aware of. Hiding a large number of iterations using favorites may lead to performance issues as one of our customers has reported on the community. A proposed work-around is to use the Team functionality to hide a part of the iteration tree. You see, teams can be configured to have a distinct root iteration. By default, the project node is the root iteration. If you change the root iteration, the nodes that are not under it will not appear in Urban Turtle. So a recommended solution would be to have a structure similar as the following:

If you make the Current Iterations node the root node for your team, then you won’t see the node Past Iterations or its children. This is a lot faster than hiding individual iterations using the Favorites feature. In Visual Studio, it is possible to move individual nodes. So you could move an iteration that is under Current Iterations to the Past Iterations node when it is complete and it will be hidden from Urban Turtle.

If you look at your own planning board, chances are you won’t find a Team menu as shown in the preceding video. This is because you need to enable it through the global.settings file. For instance, the global.settings file used in this video looks like this:

The documentation for the Team functionality (and the global.settings file) can be found here.

After breaking tradition and our monthly release cycle, Team Urban Turtle is proud to present to you version 3.13 featuring the most requested idea ever!

New Features

• Our planning board has always been agile, but we had it learn some new tricks to make it more flexible than ever. With most process templates, it is now possible to simply drag a work item and drop it anywhere you want. Urban Turtle will take care of figuring the updates required such as removing the current work item link between the item and its parent, creating a new one and prioritizing the work item within its new siblings.
• The iteration panel can now be collapsed, leaving more space for the work items. This was accomplished by inserting the iteration panel inside of the default Team Web Access side-panel. As this is where Team Web Access displays its search bar, users also gain access to search capabilities at the same time.
• With Urban Turtle 3.9, we introduced independent iteration and area settings for the planning and task boards. This change didn’t please everyone, so we decided to turn this itself into a setting. On the iteration and area panel, a pushpin icon has been added. When the pushpin is colored, it is active, forcing iteration and area settings to be retained across both boards. Otherwise, settings are independent.

Improvements

• A few usability improvements have been made to the planning board. Now that the iteration panel can now be hidden, it was obvious we needed to expand work item titles to fill the space. This automatic expanding and truncating of the work time titles is also done when resizing the window. This means that the larger screen resolution that you use, the more you will be able to see of the work item titles.
• A little known feature that has always been present on the planning board is the ability to select multiple work items to drag and drop them on an iteration, an area or the recycle bin. We’ve decided to improve this and highlight this functionality by adding checkboxes on work items. This makes it a lot more obvious that this feature exists. Please note that multi-selection does not apply when reordering work items.We’ve also ported the ability to collapse parent work items from the task board to the planning board.

Fixed Issues

• Users of the french version of the MSF Agile 5.0 process template will be glad to know that we have resolved the issue that prevented adding some child work items. The problem was due to accents in the work item types (such as Tâche).
• We have also fixed an issue preventing moving a work item after the last visible work item on the planning board.

We know that it’s been a long time coming (the ability to change work item links using drag and drop has been requested over a year ago!) and we invite you to download the latest version. Your feedback has always been invaluable to us and we’re very excited to hear what you have to say about this new release. While we already have ideas in mind for the next release, your feedback may still steer our decisions. Don’t hesitate, and voice your opinion on our community support site!

TFS Server Hosting is now offering Urban Turtle to all their clients for free. We are
proud to add another great partner to our list. Hosting solutions can help you be
ready to code really fast and focus on delivering value to your business immediately.

Have a look at their offer at www.tfsserver.com.

Benefits of using Urban Turtle in the cloud

• Start working now
  Be up and running in less than 5 minutes.
• Deliver software
  Focus on delivering software. Forget about maintenance, backup, and security hassles.
• Control costs
  Spread your investment over time and simplify your cost management.

Another great adventure for the Turtle started today!

Urban Turtle has been designed from the ground up to support custom process templates. Out of the box, we provide support for MSF Agile 5.0 (english and french), Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 and Scrum for Team System v3. However, this support is done through the use of what we call configuration mapping files, xml-based files that effectively map Urban Turtle features to your process template specification.

By default, the mapping files are located under ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Access\Web\UrbanTurtle\configuration\project’. I must advise against editing the default files as they are removed when uninstalling the application, such as when upgrading to a new version. If your project is based off one of the aforementioned process templates, I suggest that you start with a copy of one of the default files.

Among other things. creating a mapping file requires you to declare the work item types that should be visible in Urban Turtle, which fields to display and which states to map to each of the columns of the task board. You can also enable certain features such as the recycle bin which requires you to specify the state that corresponds to the Deleted state, if such a state exist. As you can guess, you should have the work item type definitions of the process template handy if you want to go through with this.

While we don’t have formal documentation for these files, their xml nature is fairly easy to figure out, especially combined with the personalized support that we provide via our community support-site or email. We also have a few online resources:

• Configuring Urban Turtle for customized process templates
• Enabling the real-time burndown with MSF Agile 5.0
• Recycle bin feature in a MSF Agile project
• Approval feature with MSF Agile 5.0

To help you get started, here are a few examples of custom configuration that you can play with:

• Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 and the Test Case work item type
• MSF Agile 5.0 (english) and the Test Case work item type
• MSF CMMI

If you need anything else, don’t hesitate to contact me. I also invite you to visit our community site where you’ll find answers to commonly asked questions. You can also propose ideas or report bugs. It is monitored very closely by the team.

Back in November of last year, we released Urban Turtle 3.6 which feature major performance improvements. To achieve this, we used a variety of code profiling tools, including Eqatec Profiler. I really liked the straight-forward interface of the product making it simple to compare profiling reports. A few months later, the Eqatec team emailed me to notify Profiler users about a great offer. Put simply, they offered a free Profiler license if I simply requested a trial license for Eqatec Analytics, a tool used to monitor application usage. I didn’t think much of it at first, but have to admit I find it hard to ignore free stuff. Plus, I was really interested in an automated solution to give us actual usage feedback from Urban Turtle users.

I started the trial and was immediately impressed at how easy it was to plug it in the application code base. A few method calls here and there and I was already looking at a web dashboard showing me what features were being used (on my development machine, mind you). I was particularly interested in the feature timings data. With a few more calls, I was quickly tracking how long some features were taking. I was imagining how useful this would be if it were data from actual users. The advantages to using such a tool are just obvious. You quickly know what versions of your application are being used (you all update to the latest version as soon as it is published, don’t you?), and better yet, what features are actually the most popular. This would be so useful when planning out the next releases. It is crazy to think we haven’t had that in the product since the very beginning.

I really enjoyed my trial and we are looking at how to seamlessly embed this in a future version of the application. All usage data would be anonymous, of course, and we are trying to come up with an opt-in/opt-out scenario. We do not want to force anyone to send us this data, and we understand that a server running a TFS instance may not have access to the internet. However, I am now convinced that having such data even from a minority of users would be of tremendous value to us. And I believe that at least a few of us will agree with me and will be more than willing to help us deliver a better turtle, release after release.

Remember our 12in12 contest? We received an update from France this morning. Well the big, big winner, Christophe Heral just sent us the picture of his new Xbox. Look at his smile.

Thanks for sending us your photo Christophe.