Urban Turtle's blog

Team Urban Turtle is proud to announce that Urban Turtle 3.0 has sim-shipped alongside Team Foundation Server 2010 and is now available for download. During the last two weeks, we’ve been hard at work to fully support the RTM version of TFS 2010. We also manage to squeeze in several UI changes to correct various graphical glitches. We firmly believe this is by far the best version ever of Urban Turtle. We look forward to hearing from everyone about this release!

Most successful Agile/Scrum teams use a multi-level planning approach. There are a couple of quotes that I like and always mention in my Scrum training:

“Planning is everything. Plans are nothing.” – Winston Churchill

“No plan survives contact with the enemy.” – Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

I think they are good guiding principles.

Lets have a look at how Urban Turtle supports teams that use multi-level planning. Here we will use an example with releases and sprints but note that you can use as many levels as you want. However, if you decide to add more levels as a team, make sure they are truly needed and they are not just inducing extra complexity.

In this blog, I will use the user story and sprint terms because they are very common. Note that terms may vary depending on the process template you are using. Urban Turtle ships with mapping files for some popular Agile/Scrum process templates. It is very easy to create a simple XML mapping file to use Urban Turtle with almost any process template. For those who have their own customized process template, we will shortly write a blog entry that will explain how to easily create the mapping file.

During early project planning, the team will create some user stories and use Urban Turtle’s drag and drop capabilities to prioritize their product backlog.

When the team is ready for release planning, it is time to add the next release and some sprints. Here I have a sample release with three sprints.

Note that it may be tempting to try and schedule up-front every story in specific sprints, but our experience shows us that it is better to defer the decisions and let the team inspect and adapt as it achieves some sprints. By deferring the commitment as much as possible, the team takes ownership of their backlog and their planning activities. In other words, have the team evaluate their capacity for the release based on past velocity and commit user stories in the release according to this.

Note that because Urban Turtle computes all the statistic roll-ups, if the team is sure that a story needs to be done in a particular sprint, they can simply commit it to a sprint via drag and drop. In doing so, the release view will not be affected. When the team will get to the sprint planning for this particular sprint they will see an that the user story is already committed.

During the first part of a sprint planning activity, the team identifies its commitment for the next sprint. The team goes to the current release and checks the option to display only user stories that are not yet committed in a sprint. Then they drag and drop the stories they want to plan in the sprint until they feel they have reached their capacity.

Note again that Urban Turtle does all of the roll-ups for the user, allowing to have the statistics for your releases and sprints at a glance.

During the second part of sprint planning, the team creates the tasks that constitute their sprint backlog.

I hope that this blog gave you a good idea how Urban Turtle supports teams in their various planning activities while keeping the flexibility of not dogmatically following the suggested process.

Happy planning.

~francois

Last week we were in Las Vegas at devconnections for the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and to present the new version of Urban Turtle. We often got the following questions :

1. Do we need to install anything on the workstations?
2. What happens if I customize the process template to fit the specific needs of my organization?
3. Does UrbanTurtle interfere with other tools from Microsoft, other vendors or that we could have developed?
4. What are your plans?
5. What is your pricing?

Do we need to install anything on the workstations?

From the beginning, our goal is that Urban Turtle users do not feel as if hey are using another product. We want to increase their comfort and simply extend their usage of Team Foundation Server (TFS). To achieve this, we did several things. The main one is that the user interface seamlessly blends in with Web Access of TFS. Therefore, there is just a one-time installation process on the server.

Furthermore when we developed the new installation process for the VS 2010 compatible version, Dominic’s (the Product Owner) condition of satisfaction was that the installation takes less than 5 minutes. The team over delivered because most of the time, the installation takes less than 2 minutes. If your installation takes longer, please let us know.

What happens if I customize the process template to fit the specific needs of my organization?

We know by experience that a lot of organization will want to use a standard process template and customize it by adding some fields to some work items or slightly customize some workflows or … In other words, there is no one way of doing Agile and Scrum. Therefore we designed Urban Turtle to let you take advantage of TFS’s customization capabilities; Urban Turtle is designed to be process template independent. It only needs to know a couple of things about your process template. This information needs to be put in a simple XML file. We will shortly write a blog entry that will explain how to easily create the mapping file. In the meantime, do not hesitate to ask questions on the forum

Does UrbanTurtle interfere with other tools from Microsoft, other vendors or that we could have developed?

No, Urban Turtle does not interfere with any tool.

Again our goal in designing Urban Turtle is that it seamlessly inserts itself in the TFS ecosystem. To achieve this, we decided to rely on standard extension mechanism and not have a separate data store. Urban Turtle directly manipulates work items using the standard APIs.

This allows us for example to validate the workflow transitions in the task board even if you customize your workflows. Also, since you customize your work item fields using standard mechanism and Urban Turtle does not add extra data, the powerful reporting and data warehousing capabilities of TFS will not be affected and will work as documented by Microsoft.

What are your plans?

The team is currently in the last sprint to release version 3.0. The product, the development environment and the team are now in a mature enough state to do solid public releases every 4 to 6 weeks. We will publish a blog every sprint to announce what we are working on.

What is your pricing?

I hope this answers the most common questions. If I missed some, do not hesitate to ask.

Do not hesitate to turtle your TFS, you are less than 5 minutes away!

~francois

Urban Turtle 3.0 was designed with the idea that the user should be free to use any process template he sees fit. In order to shield us from the details of each template, we are introducing what we call configuration mapping files that sit between Urban Turtle and the process template. And since different projects can use different templates, we needed a way to specify which mapping file should be used by each project.

To specify the mapping file for your project, launch Team Web Access, choose your project and open the Planning Board. In the iteration panel to the left, you will find the project iteration box now sports an icon with a hammer on it. This is the shortcut to the configuration page.

Click on it to get to the configuration page. From there, all you have to do is select the mapping file to use and click Apply. A validation process helps you determine which mapping files are compatible with your project’s template so that you run into errors when accessing Urban Turtle’s boards.

- Louis

Our apologies. The registration form for the Webinar scheduled on May 12th is not ready. If you are interested in participating, please send us an email at urbanturtle@pyxis-tech.com. We will contact you with the registration form as soon as it is available. In the meantime, please visit our new website www.urbanturtle.com to get more information on Urban Turtle 3.0 Release Candidate which was made available today.
Patil T

The Urban Turtle team is proud to finally present the release candidate of our Agile Project Management extension to Team Web Access 2010: Urban Turtle 3.0. This new version sports a brand new look, a streamlined user interface and full support for Team Foundation Server 2010. Make sure to download it and request a free 30-day trial, you’ll find that you can’t do Agile in TFS 2010 without Urban Turtle.

In the last few months, we’ve spent quite some time working on our template support. Out of the box, Urban Turtle supports the MSF Agile 5.0 process template. We’re actually quite proud to introduce what we think is the first and only 3-column task board to work with MSF Agile 5.0 without any modifications.

But what’s even better is that we support virtually any process template through an xml mapping file. We already provide one such file to support MSF Agile 5.0, but new ones can be added to support your own template.

We’re aiming to sim-ship alongside Team Foundation Server 2010 which has just been made available, meaning the RTM version should be ready before the end of the month. Right now, the release candidate has only been tested with TFS 2010 RC. We recommend using Microsoft’s virtual machine to try Urban Turtle 3.0 RC.

We hope you enjoy this latest release, and please do provide some feedback so that we make the turtle even better!

- Louis Pellerin

Second day at Vegas for the Turtle. After a great night at the Caramel Bar & Lounge we are ready for another day of demos ! If you are here and you read that blog come to see us and I will give you a free license for 5 users !

Note that you can follow us on Twitter at : http://twitter.com/urban_turtle and be notified of other streaming events like planning sessions, etc.

Online video chat by Ustream

- Dominic

Dominic, François and Mario are at the Visual Studio 2010 launch event in Las Vegas. They will be broadcasting live right here from the Urban Turtle booth throughout the event.

Note that you can follow us on Twitter at : http://twitter.com/urban_turtle and be notified of other streaming events like planning sessions, etc.

Online video chat by Ustream

- Louis

Join our webinar on May 12th 1PM EST, where we will demonstrate how to simplify your sprint planning in TFS using Urban Turtle with drag-and-drop functionality.

Patil