Urban Turtle's blog

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Urban Turtle has been designed from the ground up to support custom process templates. Out of the box, we provide support for MSF Agile 5.0 (english and french), Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 and Scrum for Team System v3. However, this support is done through the use of what we call configuration mapping files, xml-based files that effectively map Urban Turtle features to your process template specification.

By default, the mapping files are located under ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Access\Web\UrbanTurtle\configuration\project’. I must advise against editing the default files as they are removed when uninstalling the application, such as when upgrading to a new version. If your project is based off one of the aforementioned process templates, I suggest that you start with a copy of one of the default files.

Among other things. creating a mapping file requires you to declare the work item types that should be visible in Urban Turtle, which fields to display and which states to map to each of the columns of the task board. You can also enable certain features such as the recycle bin which requires you to specify the state that corresponds to the Deleted state, if such a state exist. As you can guess, you should have the work item type definitions of the process template handy if you want to go through with this.

While we don’t have formal documentation for these files, their xml nature is fairly easy to figure out, especially combined with the personalized support that we provide via our community support-site or email. We also have a few online resources:

• Configuring Urban Turtle for customized process templates
• Enabling the real-time burndown with MSF Agile 5.0
• Recycle bin feature in a MSF Agile project
• Approval feature with MSF Agile 5.0

To help you get started, here are a few examples of custom configuration that you can play with:

• Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 and the Test Case work item type
• MSF Agile 5.0 (english) and the Test Case work item type
• MSF CMMI

If you need anything else, don’t hesitate to contact me. I also invite you to visit our community site where you’ll find answers to commonly asked questions. You can also propose ideas or report bugs. It is monitored very closely by the team.