Urban Turtle's blog

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.