Urban Turtle 4.7 - Introducing the Product Management add-on

108606950Since the beginning of the year, we have been on a steady monthly release schedule and this month is no different. The Urban Turtle team is quite proud of introducing a brand new add-on to our loyal customers: Product Management! We had long thought of exploring the area of enterprise Agile development, and we felt the timing was right. Starting this month, we will be releasing features aimed at simplifying the lives of product owners and managers faced with the daunting task of managing the development of large-scale applications. This is only the beginning!

Feature Decomposition

The Product Management add-on is designed to get you to think of your project in terms of features, and not only product backlog items. After all, this is pretty much how your users view your product, so maybe you should too! Features are high-level requirements whose development will most likely span multiple sprints. Since you can't fit them in a single iteration, the Product Management add-on makes it easy to decompose features into product backlog items or user stories.

Product Management - Feature Decomposition

Progress Overview

As your team works on tasks and completes product backlog items, the Product Management add-on brings you a visual overview of the progress. Each features displays a progress bar which fills up as stories are completed.

Product Management - Progress Overview

Improvements and bug fixes

As usual, we have also invested efforts into improving the product in various areas. For instance, a long-requested feature (even from our own PO, Dominic) has been implemented: you are no longer required to press the Enter key when editing values in-place such as work remaining or effort. We have also fixed a few crashes caused by work items forced to appear even though they were not configured to be displayed in Urban Turtle.

TFS 2012 Update 3

We have supported the Update 3 for Team Foundation Server 2012 since the CTP2 release and since it has finally been RTMed, Urban Turtle 4.7 has been tested for compatibility with the latest service update. We are quite happy to announce that Urban Turtle 4.7 is compatible with both Update 2 and Update 3 so you can upgrade at your own pace.

More coming

We have much more planned for the future and the new Product Management add-on will continue to evolve through our ideas and your feedback. I've said it before, the latter is invaluable to us. There is nothing like hearing from you relating your hands-on experience at doing enterprise Agile development. Our tools are meant to make your life easier, so please do share your pain with us! Get started by downloading the latest version and requesting your free 30-day trial for the new Product Management add-on. Owners of an Enterprise Edition license will be glad to know that you will be granted instant access to the new add-on. Please provide any feedback via our community support site. It is closely monitored by Francis and the rest of the team!