Urban Turtle 2010 v3.16 - Just got better

While the team is mourning the on-going absence of hockey (yes, we are canucks) we decided to release a new version of Urban Turtle for TFS 2010. Although we have been busy delivering Urban Turtle 2012, we understand that many of you will not be migrating for some time. With that in mind, we wanted to continue our tradition or delivering great software.

To bring you Urban Turtle 3.16, we looked at the progress we made with Urban Turtle 2012 and decided to port back some of the new features.

Faster, nicer real-time burndown charts
Yes, we know that our product is named after an animal that, shall we say, is never in much of a hurry. But that doesn't mean you're not. Our burndown charts, while being rendered from real-time data contrary to the reports provisioned by SQL Server Reporting Services, have always been notoriously slow to render. Even we felt the pain. That's why we knew we had to improve this component in future releases. And improve we did. Porting the new charts back to the 2010 version was the first job we gave to our newest team member, Francis, who's now the first line of contact for all your support needs. We're sure you'll appreciate the hard work he put into it. The charts sport a slick new look and render pretty much instantaneously, making their real-time nature even more meaningful!

Estimation Zone
The new Estimation Zone board was introduced with the latest 2012 release, but it's always been developed in parallel for the two Urban Turtle versions. Here's what we said about it when we introduced this feature.

Introduced in an earlier post, the estimation board supports agile estimation by illustrating each story’s size relative to others. Urban Turtle's estimation board allows product owners and developers to rapidly size backlogs and if necessary, recalibrate sizing. The team can see stories that need to be estimated, visualize relative size, and quickly identify large stories that need to be split. Using the Urban Turtle estimation board not only saves your team time, it also improves estimates and because it’s built on TFS, eliminates data entry (yeah!).

As always, this release includes a slew of bug fixes and subtle improvements across the board. We strongly recommend that you upgrade to the latest version.