Urban Turtle 4.14 sprints, and prints!

triple-rocketturtleThe Urban Turtle team is proud to make available the first release of the year: Urban Turtle 4.14. With some under-the-hood tweaks and a few nice features, this is a release that you won't want to miss. Again, customer feedback played a major role in the decisions we've made and we are thankful to all of you who take the time to share their thoughts about the product with us.

Performance Improvements

We started the year by looking at feedback from a few customers who have reported slow loading time with large backlogs. After a deep dive into the turtle entrails, we emerged with performance gains of up to 40% in loading time. The Product Backlog was the main area of focus for us, but several of the changes we made apply to just about all add-ons. Even with smaller backlogs, the performance gains are noticeable. We'll continue looking at what can be improved to ensure a snappy experience with the turtle, but we feel this is a really good start.

Dashboard Widget Printing

Following through with the newly added backlog printing capability, we decided to add printing capability to all dashboard widgets. I'm sure ScrumMasters everywhere will rejoice knowing that they'll now have actual reports to hand to their no-so-Agile-inclined supervisors! :)
Print CCF

Collapse/Expand All

Several customers have asked us to add collapse all/expand all options to the Product Backlog. It might have seemed like a glaring omission to many of you, and in retrospective, it was. Better late than never, right? We thought we'd port the whole View menu from the Sprint Backlog add-on to ensure a consistent experience. This also meant moving the Filters menu to the right on the toolbar so that it's always located in the same area, no matter which add-on you are currently using.
View Menu on the Product Backlog

Hide Completed Work Items

As development progresses, hopefully, work gets done. Completed work items could start piling up on the Product Management add-on which didn't have any filtering capabilities. Starting with Urban Turtle 4.14, you now have the option to hide completed work items on a per-feature basis. This is a great way to focus on what's left to do before you can mark the feature as done.
Completed Work Items on the Product Management

Support for the CMMI template

Several customers have been trying to use Urban Turtle against CMMI-based projects. We had decided not to ship default configuration files for this process template as we are focused in delivering true Agile management tools in TFS. Not being overly familiar with the CMMI process template, we felt it was better to leave it to our customers to create their own mapping files to ensure that a truly custom experience. However, consistency between the different versions of the CMMI configuration files has proven to be an issue. We decided to provide a working configuration file along with the application, which can serve as an example if users need a slightly more customized experience.

As usual, we recommend to all our customers to upgrade to the latest version. Upgrading is a quick and painless process and it ensures that you benefit from the latest and greatest that the Turtle has to offer. I must also point out the importance that you take the time to voice your opinion. You can help drive the future of the Turtle and we're sure it's something you don't want to miss out on.