Answering some common questions about Urban Turtle

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