Urban Turtle's blog

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Another great adventure for the Turtle started today!

This week, Urban Turtle was at the DevTeach conference in Montreal.

We’ve met a lot of interesting people and TFS users. One thing to note is that many people are just starting to use the Work Item Tracking feature of TFS and they were very interested in trying out Urban Turtle. They were especially happy to know that they didn’t have to make a full switch from the tools they already know and use, such as Excel, since Urban Turtle stores everything in TFS. Some people even told us that Urban Turtle was the big piece of the puzzle missing from the default TFS offering. We like to agree!

Team Urban Turtle has finally arrived in Redmond to present our agile project management tool after a long trip yesterday. It all started with a six-hour flight from Montreal to Vancouver, a two-hour car trip, including a stop at the US customs waiting for Mathieu to fill in the VISA stuff. Apparently, when you are French and try to enter the US from here, you need to be patient and have 6 bucks in your pocket, in USD of course.

We finally arrived at the hotel at 1 AM, ready to go sleep!

This morning we took our boat, a Lincoln Town Car, to come to the Summit in building 33, with our friend ET.

People come to see us to congratulate us about our 7th release in 7 months. Being able to do this in the product business is pretty tough, and we are happy that the community recognized that !

Ken Schwaber opened the summit with a talk about ALM and Scrum not being sufficient for Agility.

Agility Requires:

1. An organizational culture change. François gave a great presentation about this at the Agile Tour.
2. Good engineering practices.
3. Continuous Improvement.
4. Reactivity, persistence, hard work and headaches, vision and insights.

Next talk: The state of ALM: An industry view, by David West.

The Turtle is literally in the sky.

Follow our team with Flight Stats

Urban Turtle is a brand developed by Pyxis Technologies. For our 10th anniversary, we decided to produce some funny videos to demonstrate how we do things at Pyxis. You’ll see that everyone is equally respected, regardless of roles and responsibilities. We think of software development as an art, unleashing craftsmanship in a fun, lighthearted atmosphere. Life’s good for everyone involved at Pyxis.

Members of the team had a great time filming these videos. Try to find Dom, our product owner, dressed in medieval gear or Luc, developer on the team, literally hacking away at his keyboard.

We are also really proud of the brand new web site that we just launched. You’ll see that the individuals that make up the Pyxis team are really at the foreground here.

We invite you to meet all members of Team Urban Turtle. We’re having a great time developing this product and we hope you also have a great experience using it!

The turtle ride continues, 5 releases in 5 months !

Release 3.0 : Support for Visual Studio Team System 2010
Release 3.1 : Support for Areas, Ranking across multiple pages, Reduced installation footprint
Release 3.2 : Support for Visual Studio Scrum 1.0, Favorite iterations and areas
Release 3.3 : Real-time Hour Burndown Chart with support for TFS Basic, Filtering based on Work Item Types

And we’re now introducing the Recycle Bin in Release 3.4.

In this release, the team is proud to present a new feature to help Scrum teams focus on the right things. The new recycle bin will allow teams to clean their backlog and concentrate on the more important stories and tasks.

The team also made it possible to quickly flag and unflag all iterations and areas as favorites. Various bug fixes and optimizations have also found their way into this release. For instance, the stack rank or backlog priority field does not get updated anymore when accessing the planning or task board. This should improve performance when displaying pages and reduce the number of meaningless entries found in work item history.

Again thanks for your support and be ready for the next release… 6th one in 6 months, maybe?

Now that the vacations are over and that the 2010 Agile conference has come and gone, Team Urban Turtle is back to work, cooking up another promising release 3.4.

With the release of the Scrum template from Microsoft came a Removed state, making it necessary to propose a recycle bin feature to our users. The next version of Urban Turtle will therefore include a recycle bin icon at the top of the iterations and areas panel. Users will be able to drag and drop items onto it to set the state of selected items to a configured deleted state. It will also be possible to view deleted work items by clicking on the icon.

The team is also working on a select / unselect all option to flag or unflag all iterations and areas as favorites in one click.

We have several more interesting features in our backlog, some of them coming from customers who voiced their opinions and proposed suggestions on our community-powered support site. Thank you all for your support and keep those suggestions coming!

} Dom

The Urban Turtle is at Agile 2010 with its fourth release in four months since the Visual Studio 2010 release in April.

During the opening night, the turtle spent some time flying!

We are also kicking off a fun contest to win an Xbox with the Kinect module.

If you are in Orlando, come by the booth to get a sticker, stick it on an unusual place and upload it to the contest page. If you are not in Orlando you can also participate. Download a sticker here. Do not hesitate to vote for the photo you prefer at Urban Turtle fan page.

One of the main orientations is to build Urban Turtle into TFS (as opposed to integrate with). All our design decisions are made to bring as much value-added as possible while creating a seamless experience for existing TFS users and grow with TFS as Microsoft adds new features.

If you are interested about the details of the three releases we have made since the Visual Studio 2010 launch in April, please read the following posts:

1. April 30th – Urban Turtle 3.0 RTM is now available!
2. June 4th – Urban Turtle 3.1 now available!
3. July 8th – Urban Turtle 3.2 now available! – Support Visual Studio Scrum 1.0

We believe this orientation is what allows us to have a product that installs on the server in less than two minutes and gets a team to use it right away. We are very interested in hearing your stories and get your feedback about how we can further improve the experience.

Help us make our Urban Turtle a Chameleon

Also, our tight integration in the Web Access user interface makes the user feel at home and perceive TFS with new capabilities (as opposed to using an extra product). This is a big plus to have a smooth user adoption. We know that adopting scrum is already an interesting challenge; you do not need tools to get in your way but be a possible accelerator.

Again, give Urban Turtle a try and let us know how we succeeded in turning it into a Chameleon.

All members of Team Urban Turtle are great fans of the Montreal Canadiens and we were quite sad to hear the news today that Halak had been traded to the Blues. While working on the past few releases, we fed on the adrenaline rush generated by Halak’s breathtaking performance during the playoffs. We’re disappointed to see him go but we wish him the best of luck with his new team.