Urban Turtle's blog

Once again the team has committed to a new release Monday morning.

This is the plan for the next trip !

In the first sprint, we will make sure that the Turtle can sprint with the new Team Foundation Server Scrum v1.0 template announced at TechEd on Monday. You can download the new template here. We are really excited that Microsoft has decided to jump in the scrum world!

In the second sprint, we will implement a natural way to filter areas and iterations using a tag concept. You will have the option to put a push pin on some areas and iterations to apply a filter based on those selected and work with a subset of the work items. This will simplify backlog visualization and make sure the team’s focus is on delivering awesome software sprint after sprint.

This will help you doing enterprise scrum and complex project management with the Turtle.

If you want to manage your projects like one big project as suggested by Martin Hinshelwood on his blog, this feature will let you do that with Urban Turtle. I think you will really like this new feature.

Send us your comments on the forums!

Dominic !

In Urban Turtle’s Next Destination we listed the features that the team intended to produce for the first sprint of the release scheduled for June 2nd. I am as very happy product owner because the team delivered everything that was intended for the sprint and we have more killer features in the next and final sprint of this release.

The main feature is the integration of areas in the planning board. We were not pleased with the way we had develop this feature in our TFS 2008 version. We think we have a better design that will please all users. We are eager to release it on June 2nd to have your feedback.

As always, feedback is greatly appreciated as comments here or on the forum.

As you know, Urban Turtle 3.0 was released last week. However the team does not stop working here. We gathered yesterday to plan the next two week sprint.

The team’s commitment for the next sprint is:

• More convenient way to rank stories across multiple pages in the planning board.
• Quick links to access reports.
• Screen real estate optimization in the task board.
• Document how to easily activate and deactivate Urban Turtle (request from David Starr).
• Tooltip showing full text when truncated on the card.
• Validation and adjustments in the French version.

There will be another two-week sprint leading to the next release. What we have in mind so far for this sprint is a first step in implementing convenient ways to organize your backlog using areas / tags.

Any feedback or suggestions on the direction the turtle should be sprinting will be greatly appreciated. Do not hesitate to comment here or post the comments on the forum.

Second day at Vegas for the Turtle. After a great night at the Caramel Bar & Lounge we are ready for another day of demos ! If you are here and you read that blog come to see us and I will give you a free license for 5 users !

Note that you can follow us on Twitter at : http://twitter.com/urban_turtle and be notified of other streaming events like planning sessions, etc.

Online video chat by Ustream

- Dominic

Aujourd’hui nous avons présenté notre premier Backlog Maintenance live sur UStream!

Donnez-nous vos commentaires!

Bonne écoute!

Vous pouvez voir d’autres vidéos sur urban.tv

} dominic

Someone asked me some good questions this morning in my mail. Here are my answers!

1. What made you develop this?
We at Pyxis Technologies are experts in Agile methodologies and it was obvious that TFS needed an interface where it would be easier to manage Scrum projects.

2. What do you do?
At Pyxis, Agility is guiding our practices every day. That is why we are a reference in Agile software development.
We offer agile coaching, consulting, development and training services. We also have a product business where we apply all those techniques to develop some great products

3. Have you got a version that works with the TFS 2010 RC ?
We currently have a Beta version of Urban Turtle for TFS 2010 Beta 2 and will have a version for the RC version available at the end of the current sprint (Friday march 5th).

4. What process templates do you support?
We will support virtually any template with the official release of version 2010 planned for April 12th. For the moment, in the Beta and RC versions, we restrict support to the MSF Agile 5.0 template from Microsoft.

5. URLs of screen captures?
We can only provide screen captures of Urban Turtle because of licence issues preventing us from allowing online access to a demo instance of TFS for trial purposes. We are currently looking into this with Microsoft and hope to have this issue worked around in the near future. With regards to version 2010, it is not currently available on the site but we can provide a trial version that can be installed on the VS2010Beta2 VM available from Microsoft on demand. Just send an email to urbanturtle@pyxis-tech.com to inquire about joining our early adopters program.

6. What have been the difficult things?
The integration with Web Access was a bit tough. The documentation available on the web is almost inexistent. We also had some performance issues at the beginning related to the way we accessed the TFS web services.

7. What things do you want MS to fix?
Microsoft needs to build a real Scrum template. MSF Agile 5.0 is a huge improvement over the previous version, but we still find it lacking when it comes to managing Scrum projects.

} dominic

For the one that missed the opportunities to assist the planning this morning, you can view it at

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/4561418

} dominic

Urban Turtle needs more space!

In order to be able to foresee the growth of Pyxis Technologies, we decided to add more space to our actual office by taking the one next door. This is the first collaborator that has decided to move to the other side!
I think something is missing…
Mathieu, do you want a table?

Team Urban Turtle!