Now that the product is gaining in popularity, we get more and more feedback and requests. Our challenge is to make sure the product backlog is prioritized optimally to deliver you guys maximum value through our monthly release cycle.

To help us achieve this, we recently started asking people to prioritize their requests by focusing on their #1 feature for improvement.

This is how it goes: Let’s imagine you are driving the Urban Turtle team and, for a moment, you are the product owner. The team is yours for a sprint. What is the most important improvement to make? Which user story should we implement? Tell us what need to be added (or removed) to the product. This is your chance.

Of course, you can add a comment to this blog, but the best way to make a suggestion is by sharing your idea on our community site. Through the community site, others can vote for your ideas and increase their priority. Just make sure that you add “#1″ in the idea description.

http://community.urbanturtle.com/urbanturtle#idea

We want to hear from you. Help us make the turtle sprint a little faster in the right direction … Play The Urban Turtle product owner game with us.

The turtle ride continues, 6 releases in 6 months!
Team Urban Turtle is once again proud to announce the release of a new version of Urban Turtle. We’ve received a lot of feedback from our customers and partners and we’ve worked hard to show our appreciation to all the turtle aficionados out there!

Burndown filtered according to selected area
John, this one’s for you! …and for many other people who have told us it would be great if the real-time burndown in Urban Turtle would take into account the currently selected area, like it does the selected iteration.

Support for Readers
Not everyone who needs access to Urban Turtle should have the appropriate rights to actually edit work items. Urban Turtle did not always play nice with people having limited access rights, such as people in the default TFS Readers group. You can now safely allow anyone to take a look at your team’s progress. Urban Turtle automatically activates drag and drop and editing capabilities according to the user’s access rights.

Per-project activation
Want to test drive Urban Turtle with a pilot project without impacting the other projects on your server? No problem! Urban Turtle can now be set to appear only for projects specified in a configuration file. This one’s strictly for administrative purposes. Contact us for more information about how to use this feature. Urban Turtle is still a next-next-next experience, meaning click through the installation wizard and the turtle is ready to go! All projects have access to Urban Turtle by default.

Improvements and fixed issues
We’re not perfect. We make mistakes. And we embrace opportunities to improve our development process and our product!

Urban Turtle now automatically selects the first valid configuration mapping file for your project. We’ve improved the session management and the favorite iterations/areas feature. The footer now displays important information about your license. And everyone can uninstall the product (when you need to upgrade to the latest version, of course!). We also fixed this, this, this and several other issues. And for a lot these improvements, we have you to thank for your feedback. You guys are awesome!

There is simply no reason not to try Urban Turtle! So give it a shot and download Urban Turtle 3.5 today! And, as always, we strongly encourage you to take the time and send us questions and comments either directly or through our community support site. Any kind of comments, good and bad. We just want to improve and create a better product, release after release, and we just cannot do it without you!

Assisting teams and organizations adopt Scrum and Agile practices for many years, I have realized, sometimes the hard way that Agile is a culture change. If you are interested in exploring more the topic of cultures and their implications, there are many resources available. I suggest you have a look at Bill Schneider’s work. I also suggest this blog post from Michael Spayd.

I have found Schneider’s core culture model very useful to assess the culture in place in a group that wants to adopt Scrum and Agile. Depending on how much time you want to allow, you can do an intuitive assessment or have some people go through the questionnaire that you can find in the book The Reengineering Alternative. By having the questionnaire by multiple persons at various levels and with various roles in the organizations, you can develop a good understanding of the culture in place. With the assessment results in hand, you have a marvelous tool to drive conversations and start identifying the challenges of the transition to Scrum and Agile and where to focus efforts.

Adopting Agile will certainly bring significant challenges in creating a team/collaboration culture, solid incremental software engineering practices, value driven planning, etc. Therefore, the last thing you want is tooling to get in the way. I have found that people put too much focus on the tooling for managing their scrums and not enough focus on the core issues. My advice, especially in the early stages of a product or project, is to use the tools that will provide the highest level of collaboration and interactions. Those are collaborative sessions where you use flip-charts, post-its, whiteboards, etc. Until we have tools that support a very high level of interactions and allow teams to create story maps and other models collaboratively and efficiently, I think it is wise to stick with those simple tools in those product exploration and definition sessions.

For various reasons, a significant portions of the Scrum / Agile teams will want to use an electronic tool to do planning and tracking. Again, I think the best tools are the ones that do not get in the way of collaboration. As outlined in Scrum and Agile Built Into Microsoft Team Foundation Server I presented how we design Urban Turtle to blend much like a chameleon into the existing environment for organizations that are using Team Foundation Server. The Urban Turtle team is committed to enabling software teams to create kick-ass software fast and we are always striving to make the user experience seamless and simple. Give Urban Turtle a try and please let us know what you think we need to improve in Urban Turtle or what you think we completely got wrong. Please be candid. We have done a release per month (5) since the release of TFS 2010 and intend to continue sustaining this pace. Therefore, there is a high chance that if your suggestion is great, it will be included in the product soon.

I value a lot exchanging points of view and experiences. Please do not hesitate to comment here, or send me an email to setup a live conversation.

In a previous post, Sprints and Compelling Goals, I expressed my opinion on why I think commitment driven planning is much more powerful than capacity planning. In the next post I will present why I think compelling goals drive collaboration and creativity. Stay tuned!

Cheers,
~françois

Last Friday, October 1st, I was in London to participate in a workshop to learn how to write patterns. This workshop, directed by Linda Rising, was sponsored by the Agile Alliance to help clarify the field of Agile Specifications. This event is the first step of a long journey.  Our ultimate goal is to define a “pattern language” that will unify Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Acceptance Test-driven development (ATDD) and Framework for Integrated Test (FIT).

Wikipedia as a neat and concise definition of what is a “pattern language”:

A pattern language is a structured method of describing good design practices within a field of expertise. It is characterized by:

1. Noticing and naming the common problems in a field of interest,
2. Describing the key characteristics of effective solutions for meeting some stated goal,
3. Helping the designer move from problem to problem in a logical way, and
4. Allowing for many different paths through the design process.

At the heart of a “pattern language” is a collection of patterns that forms a vocabulary for understanding and communicating ideas. We can define a ‘pattern’ as a three-part construct. First there is the ‘context’ – the conditions under which this pattern holds. Next is a ’system of forces’. In many ways, it is natural to think of this as the ‘problem’ or ‘goal’. The third part is the ’solution’ – a configuration that balances the system of forces or solves the problems presented.

During the workshop, I had the chance to write my first pattern and have it reviewed by my peers. Altogether, we spent the day creating a first draft of the pattern language while learning the process. I had an awesome day and it’s already clear that this initiative is going to produce something pretty amazing.

So how is this important for Urban Turtle? In the short term, this is not so much important, but in the long term, it is. Our long term vision is to evolve Urban Turtle so that it will not only be the best tool for agile planning but also the best tool for agile specifications on the MS platform. This “pattern language” initiative is a first milestone. Stay tuned!

~Mario

PS. To learn more about patterns (and pattern language), here is a good overview by Brad Appleton

Urban Turtle is a brand developed by Pyxis Technologies. For our 10th anniversary, we decided to produce some funny videos to demonstrate how we do things at Pyxis. You’ll see that everyone is equally respected, regardless of roles and responsibilities. We think of software development as an art, unleashing craftsmanship in a fun, lighthearted atmosphere. Life’s good for everyone involved at Pyxis.

Members of the team had a great time filming these videos. Try to find Dom, our product owner, dressed in medieval gear or Luc, developer on the team, literally hacking away at his keyboard.

We are also really proud of the brand new web site that we just launched. You’ll see that the individuals that make up the Pyxis team are really at the foreground here.

We invite you to meet all members of Team Urban Turtle. We’re having a great time developing this product and we hope you also have a great experience using it!