Urban Turtle's blog

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.

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.

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.

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!