How can Urban Turtle help you estimate user stories?

Simon here, Scrum Master for the Turtle team. As you may already know, the Urban Turtle development team uses the same tool it is offering to TFS users…a tool to plan its work, to keep track of progress and to manage its day-to-day activities using an Agile approach. This enables us to continually test the application and constantly identify new ways to improve it.

Our goal is to make you able to rely on Urban Turtle for every aspect of the Agile product management cycle. Are you still keeping an excel spreadsheet on the side to keep track of costs? Are you handwriting tasks and stories on sticky notes before copying them in the application? Is your shared folder filled with pictures of that huge story map you did a while back? Let’s put all that in the same tool and make it easy-to-use.

As a Scrum Master, at every release or sprint planning session I’m torn between using cards on the wall and entering the data directly in the tool. I’m a huge fan of getting the team on its feet and posting sticky notes all across the wall, especially when we estimate. The level of energy, interactivity and efficiency is worth the extra time I put in to copy the cards in the tool after the team leaves. I prefer that to the often long and hazardous estimation sessions where we jump from screen to screen for each estimate. What do you think five IT early adopters do while the planning board is projected on the screen and their non-computer savvy Scrum Master is holding the mouse? I can hear their teeth clenching from across the room!

Guys, you want to use Urban Turtle to estimate 40+ user stories in less than 2 hours? Ok, prove to me that it can be done in a more fun and efficient way than my Wall Poker Planning duck-tape and sticky notes setup!

Well ladies and gentlemen, I think they did it.

Stay tuned, I can’t wait for the next release!

Simon