Urban Turtle's blog

Yesterday, I presented at the ALM Summit which is an event targeting TFS 2010 and Agile project management using Scrum. My talk was about extending the ALM platform. My recommendation to the attendees was that they should not hesitate to buy 3rd party products (add-on) and extend the Microsoft TFS platform. However, they should make sure that they understand the implication of extending the ALM platform using add-on. In consequence, they should ensure to select according to a list of criteria.

When selecting a 3rd party product, here are some items that should be in your list of criteria:

Features Set

• Does it provides the minimal required features?

Product Vision and Support

• Can I envision a long term relationship?
• Is it a supported product?

Evolution of the ALM platform

• Does it easily migrate to the next version of Visual Studio ALM platform?

TFS Add-on or a TFS connector

• Does it read and write directly in Team Foundation Server (TFS)?
• If not, what are the implications for the warehouse and reporting?

Visual Studio ALM process templates

• Does it work with your ALM templates (Scrum, MSF agile, CMMI, custom)?

Deployment and maintainability

• Which server technology is used?
• Is it compatible with your TFS topology?
• Does it deploy directly on TFS?
• If not, what are the implications for maintainability?
• If so, does it interfere with service updates from Microsoft?
• Which client technology is used?
• WPF or Silverlight or HTML5?

TFS integration

• What are the add-on configuration settings ?
• Does it bypass security?
• Is there an “hidden” operational data store?
• Does it transfer add-on informations to the cube?

Localization

• Is it compatible with the localized edition of TFS?

Why publish this list? Mainly because these are the same questions that we asked ourselves while developing Urban Turtle. Our goal was to eliminate any negative impact. This is why we are convinced that Urban Turtle is one of the best TFS add-on.

The Turtle in the Cloud has reached its destination which is the ALM Summit. Urban Turtle is a gold sponsor at this event which will be targeting TFS and Agile project management using Scrum.

Now that Urban Turtle is available in the cloud, we are proud to confirm that it is even easier to adopt. Our partner, PRAKTIK Hosting, has just updated their hosting offering to provide an option for licensing Urban Turtle on top of TFS 2010. PRAKTIK Hosting is an established company that specializes in Microsoft Visual Studio technologies and is a premier provider of hosted Microsoft Team Foundation Server services.

Why is the cloud of interest. Because it is quick, easy, fast, and increasingly simple. These as well as other obvious trends confirm that offering Urban Turtle as a hosted service makes a lot of sense. Here are some of the major benefits:

• Be up and running now! (in less than a day if you take your time)
• No need to invest in expensive hardware and software
• No need to purchase costly bulk licences
• No need to worry about maintenance, backups, and security
• Developers in different locations are able to collaborate efficiently

PRAKTIK Hosting is offering two plans for agile project management with TFS:

1. TFS Basic with Urban Turtle:  $35 per user/month
2. TFS Standard with Urban Turtle: $70 per user/month (if more than 10 users)

The investment to start using Urban Turtle is really small. PRAKTIK Hosting takes care of everything. They even offer a 30-day free trial licence if you have any doubts.

We think it is a great solution for teams of all sizes and first-time TFS users. One of the cool things is that, for the end user, Urban Turtle as a hosted solution is the same as on-premises, no differences. All you have to do is work on your projects and use Urban Turtle to plan and track them.

Team Urban Turtle has finally arrived in Redmond to present our agile project management tool after a long trip yesterday. It all started with a six-hour flight from Montreal to Vancouver, a two-hour car trip, including a stop at the US customs waiting for Mathieu to fill in the VISA stuff. Apparently, when you are French and try to enter the US from here, you need to be patient and have 6 bucks in your pocket, in USD of course.

We finally arrived at the hotel at 1 AM, ready to go sleep!

This morning we took our boat, a Lincoln Town Car, to come to the Summit in building 33, with our friend ET.

People come to see us to congratulate us about our 7th release in 7 months. Being able to do this in the product business is pretty tough, and we are happy that the community recognized that !

Ken Schwaber opened the summit with a talk about ALM and Scrum not being sufficient for Agility.

Agility Requires:

1. An organizational culture change. François gave a great presentation about this at the Agile Tour.
2. Good engineering practices.
3. Continuous Improvement.
4. Reactivity, persistence, hard work and headaches, vision and insights.

Next talk: The state of ALM: An industry view, by David West.

UrbanTurtle just arrived in Redmond best known as the home of Microsoft.

Did you know that:

Microsoft has over 93,000 full-time workers and more than 8 million square feet of office space in the Seattle area Eastside region. Can’t wait to meet ALM Summit attendees.

Urban Turtle has landed in Vancouver and is discovering the city which hosted the 2010 Olympic winter games. Is the Turtle Agile enought to sprint on the Richmond Olympic Oval?

Next stop Redmond!

The Turtle is literally in the sky.

Follow our team with Flight Stats

UrbanTurtle is ready for take off. The team is boarding the plane heading to Vancouver.  Final destination Redmond for ALM Summit. We are thrilled to meet with our friends at Microsoft.

This week (from November 16 to 18) the Urban Turtle team is at the ALM Summit which takes place on the campus of Microsoft in Redmond, WA. We are proud to be a Gold sponsor at this event which will be targeting TFS and agile project management using Scrum.

During that conference, we will officially announce the availability of Urban Turtle as a hosted solution through our partner PRAKTIK Hosting.

Furthermore, I will speak during that event about extending the ALM platform.

Extending the ALM Platform – Mario Cardinal
Discover how third-party vendors fill the gaps and add value to the Microsoft’s ALM platform. Whether you need Outlook integration, Agile planning or release management, there is a solution available today. Learn the criteria for evaluating how third-party products integrate seamlessly with your ALM platform. Overall, discover how to build an ALM platform that enable the whole team (Stakeholders, Analysts, Developers, and Testers) to work together to produce quality products.

If you are attendees, visit us at our booth. We look forward to meet you during the ALM Summit.

The recycle bin feature in Urban Turtle is nothing else than a global filter (global here means that this filter will be applied in all application views) for items in a particular state.
Users are now able to change work items state to this particular state by drag and dropping items from the Planning Board to the recycle bin and view items that in this state by clicking the recycle icon in the Planning Board.

This feature is available “out of the box” with the Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template because this one declares a Removed state for most of the work items it defines:

• Bug
• Product Backlog Item
• Task

In the default Urban Turtle mapping configuration file for the Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template, the removed state is defined as the Cloaked state.

That is to say that “under the hood”, Urban Turtle will never show any Bug, Product Backlog Item or Task in the Planning Board and in the Task Board if their state is equal to Removed.

In order to enable the Recycle Bin feature with another process template, you will have to define a common Cloaked state for every work item that could be recycled. In this post, we will update the MSF 5 for Agile Software development process template to be able to recycle useless items of type Task, Bug or User Story.

To add this common state to the targeted work items, we will use the Process Editor as we already did in the previous post describing how to activate the Proposal Feature.

Select the menu : Tools >> Process Editor >> Work Items Types >>Open WIT from Server

Connect to your Team Foundation Server and your Project Collection and select the User Story work item type in a project created with the MSF 5 for Agile Software Development process template.

In the work item type editor, select the Workflow tab. The initial workflow should appear :

Note : the present diagram has a Proposed state defined to activate the Approval feature in Urban Turtle.

Open the Toolbox and drag and drop a new state called Removed in the diagram. You can edit the name of the state by double clicking in the state box.

You now have to create the different transitions from existing states. In most cases, the Recycle bin will be used to cloak some items that do not give value anymore (duplicated, obsolete, misunderstanding…).
Select the Transition Link tool in the toolbox and create a link between the Proposed state box and the new added Removed state box. You can repeat this action to add a transition from the Active state box and the Removed state box.

The new workflow for this work item would enable you to remove work items of type User Story in the recycle bin but you probably want to be able to reactivate removed work items. To do so, add another transition fron the Removed state box to the Proposed state box (this will allow your Product Owner to reevaluate the relevance of the user story).

Your final workflow should look like this one below :

Do not forget to add any required reasons for all the added transitions and save your work item definition.

Your process template is now able to support the recycle bin feature. You can activate the feature in the urban turtle configuration file. On the Team Foundation Server Application Tier, find and edit the Urban Turtle configuration mapping file from your updated process template.

Once again, we strongly recommend to make a copy of this file before editing it.

%TFS INSTALL DIR%\Application Tier\Web Access\Web\UrbanTurtle\configuration\project

Add a new element in the Features Section, defining the cloaked state.

Finally, you will have to apply this new configuration file to your existing project in Urban Turtle. To do so, connect to your project in Urban Turtle and select Project >> Configuration in the urban turtle toolbar.

Select the updated configuration file (in this example the MSF 5 agile) and click Apply.

To test the feature, create a new user story in the updated team project. You can now hide this story from your backlog just by draging it in the recycle bin in the iteration and area toolbar.

In a soon coming article, we will configure our project to be able to consult the Burndown chart.