Urban Turtle's blog

Almost a whole year has gone by since the release of Team Foundation Server 2010 and our add-in for its Team Web Access application tier, Urban Turtle 3. Since then, we have managed to release a new version each month, for a total of eleven. Some say it’s too much, others say it’s impressive, but the team thinks nothing of it. We’re just working hard, trying to improve our product release after release. Frequent releases is merely a side effect!

Scrum for Team System
This month, we bring you two outstanding features along with the ubiquitous bug fixes. First on the list is further improved support for Scrum for Team System v3 (refered to SfTS from now on). We’ve been shipping beta support for this template for a few months now through a compatible mapping file but users have found it to be lacking. The problem lies with the custom types used by SfTS. Both the MSF Agile 5.0 and Scrum 1.0 process templates use the standard Parent-Child relationship to link most work item types. With SfTS most links are named according to the type of the relationship. For instance, a task implements a product backlog item and is not merely a child of it, as with the other templates. The Parent-Child relationship was the only one supported by Urban Turtle until today. This meant that work items created with Urban Turtle would not appear as expected when looked at from the SfTS tooling and reports, and vice versa.

With Urban Turtle 3.10, we are introducing support for the Direct Links query mode which allows Urban Turtle to display all link types between work items. This means that a task that implements a product backlog item and another task that is a child of the same product backlog item will both be displayed as children on the planning board.

Another cool feature is that you can now explicitly define the link types in the mapping file. By default, when adding a child item using the plus sign on a card, the Parent-Child link type is used. You can override this by specifying the link type to use and Urban Turtle will automatically create the appropriate relationship when adding a child item. This is obviously required for the SfTS template, and the mapping file has been updated accordingly. You can also use this feature to restrict the work item types that are allowed to be created as children as only the link types specified are displayed on the Add child dialog. Define a single link type and you can even avoid the dialog altogether!

Teams!
The second major feature of this release is Team Configuration and Management. It is now possible to specify teams on a per-project basis, allowing further filtering options and better control over the Assign tasks to drop-down list on the task board.

A team is composed of a name, a root iteration, a root area and a TFS Security Group. Both the root iteration and area affect which iterations and areas are visible from Urban Turtle when the team is selected. By default, Urban Turtle uses the project node as the root for both the iteration and area paths. This new feature allows you to override this default behavior and automatically hide some classification paths. We expect people already using areas to divide team work to really appreciate this new feature.

We use the TFS Security Group to determine which teams are displayed on the new Team menu by verifying the current user’s membership. When a team is selected, the Assign tasks to drop-down list displays the security group members, this overrides the default behavior of listing individual users who have access to the project.

Configuration is done through the global.settings file, which was only used before to control access to Urban Turtle. Documentation for this file can be found here.

Other improvements
We’ve made several other improvements throughout the application. On the task board, we’ve tweaked the pagination system and turned the collapsing/expanding of a parent work item into an instant action. We’ve also fixed an issue with the Burndown where the planning board settings would be used even when launching it from the task board. More improvements and bug fixes are listed in our release notes on the download page.

Available now!
As usual, we recommend that everyone upgrade to the latest version. If you’re still pondering whether or not the Turtle is worth a try, rest assured that we’ve gone to great lengths to make the first experience as painless as possible. The setup is a simple three-click, next-next-next affair and the integration with Team Web Access is seamless. You’ll find two new tabs, Planning board and Task board, and with the common MSF Agile 5.0, Scrum 1.0 and now Scrum for Team System v3 templates, you’ll be up and running right after the installation. So don’t hesitate, download it and give it a try. Don’t forget about our community support site. All questions, comments, suggestions or bug reports are more than welcome. You’ll get answers straight from the team in a timely fashion, so post away!

It is really cold up here in Montreal, but this Turtle is not the hibernating kind. Once again, relentlessly, the team has worked hard to bring you its tenth release in ten consecutive months. While we’re happy with our track record, we’re definitely a lot happier with the contents of each of these releases and the latest one is no exception. It’s packed with new features, improvements and bug fixes of all kinds, so read on to find out what’s new!

Taskboard Improvements
Several new features have been added to the task board.

• Warning Zone


Ever since we’ve added support for the Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template, people have come to us asking why some work items were not visible on the task board. Most of the time, the simple reason was that they were in a state that was not configured to appear under one of the columns. While this made sense to us, it was still pretty confusing. We wanted to find a solution that would not force us to map states to columns in a way that did not make sense. What we’ve come up with is something that will hopefully remove some of the confusion while helping people realize that some work items should probably not be in the team’s sprint backlog.

Work items in a state not mapped to one of the task board columns will now appear under a new section dubbed ‘The Warning Zone’. The cards in this section appear a little bit different than the cards in columns. The state of the work item appears as a link that will allow you to quickly change to a state mapped to a column. In theory, the warning zone should never be visible. If you see it, it means you’re probably doing something against the rules.



• Recycle bin

The task board is all about simplifying work item state transitions. In this regard, we’ve implemented an equivalent to the Recycle Bin feature of the planning board. Put simply, if a ‘Deleted’ state is configured in your mapping file, as it is by default with the Scrum template, a recycle bin icon will be visible on the card if the transition to this state is possible. This is a great way to quickly remove tasks involving work that is now unnecessary!

• Blocked tasks

Scrum 1.0 users have asked us why there was no visual cue when they flagged a task as blocked. This was a very good question for which we simply had no good answer and so we went straight ahead and implemented the suggestion. Indeed, it is very useful to know at a glance that a task is blocked and requires attention from your Scrummaster. As always, this feature is configurable, meaning that you can add your own Blocked field to your work item type definition and gain this feature by rolling out your own mapping file.

• Independant iterations and areas

Another interesting change is that the task board now has iteration and area settings that are independant from the planning board. This allows you to view the current sprint on the task board while grooming your backlog on the planning board without having to switch back and forth between iterations.

Steer clear of the editor!
The work item editor is arguably the slowest window to use in Team Web Access. While it is sometimes a necessary evil, we’ve added some features to reduce round-trips to it.

• Detailed tooltips

We’ve replaced the default tooltips in some areas of the application by ones that display more information. For instance, the tooltip for a card in either board now displays the full title of the work item and the contents of a configurable description field. By default, when using the stock Scrum 1.0 and MSF Agile mapping files, we’ve configured the description field for each of the work item types to display the content of left-side text area from the work item editor.

This also works for the iteration information icon on the left-hand side of the planning board. With the Scrum 1.0 template, the tooltip will display the start and end dates of the sprint along with the team’s goal.

The information icon has also been added to the task board, to the right of the iteration drop-down list. You’ll have no good reason to forget your sprint goal now!


• Improved in-place editing

Urban Turtle 3.7 introduced in-place editing for work remaining on the task board as a way to avoid using the work item editor just to update a task. We had promised that this was only the beginning of a new trend in Urban Turtle, and with this new release, we’ve improved and extended this feature.

The major complaint with this feature in previous versions was that the clickable zone was just too small. Some people weren’t even aware of the existence of such a functionality in Urban Turtle. We’ve therefore expanded the zone and changed the visual style of the editable fields to improve usability.

Up until now, this feature only applied to the work remaining field, and only on the task board. This is no longer true as you will now be able to quickly edit both the work remaining and effort (story points) fields in either board. Decimal values are also now supported, making it possible to use your full planning poker deck, including the 0.5 card!

Support for Chrome and Safari
We are quite happy to announce that we’ve removed the biggest hurdle preventing Chrome and Safari support: drag and drop on the planning board. This bug finally moved up the priority ladder and the team happily squashed it! We expect feedback from the community regarding this initial support. There’s even a special place on our community support-site to notify us of any issue found while using Chrome or Safari. Please help us improve!

Other improvements and bug fixes
We’ve also managed to squeeze in many smaller improvements and bug fixes in this release:

• The Hour Burndown popup is now centered (and can now be shown more than once in Internet Explorer)
• New child items are never assigned to the current user
• Rank or priority is now always initialized to 0 when creating a work item
• The task board colum headers are now gray instead of orange to reduce eye bleeding
• It is now possible to enable Urban Turtle on a per-collection basis
• Several bug fixes listed in the release notes

We’ve put a lot of work into this release, coming in to work during snowstorms and arctic cold. It’s one of our most jam-packed releases and we hope you will enjoy everything it brings to the table. If you do, or if you don’t, we want to hear from you! The community site is more popular than ever and it’s a great way to gather votes for your ideas. So experience the latest version and voice your opinion. We’re listening!

Nine in nine!
As our customers are well aware of, each and every month we release a new Turtle. For each of these releases, we try to focus on soothing users pains while respecting our vision of a simple, dedicated Scrum management tool for Team Foundation Server. It’s actually a fun and challenging balance to try and maintain and the team loves challenges!

Out with the old…
Our main focus for Urban Turtle 3.8 was improving support for dealing with multiple states in the task board columns. We used to have a feature where, upon dropping a work item onto a column where multiple states were mapped, a dialog would pop up to let the user pick the new state. This was fine when moving between columns but it was quite impractical if you wanted to transition to another state that was mapped to the same column. Put simply, we made it hard for fans of the popular To Do -> In Progress -> Ready to test -> Done workflow to use our task board.

…in with the new!
With this new version, you can now pick the next state for your work item as you drop it on the column. But what makes it really interesting is that you can now drop a work item in the column it is already in while choosing a new state. It is very straight-forward and quick to pick up. Taking the previous example, you could now map both the In Progress and Ready to test states to the In Progress column and easily transition between these states.

To help you distinguish between the multiple states in each of the column, we have added the ability to configure a color for each of the states. This color is then used to add a visual cue on the card and on the drop zones when dragging work items. This configuration is a new section in the mapping file. If you use a customized mapping file, you will need to add the section and pick colors for the different states in your project.

And a few bonuses
Other features include keyboard shortcuts to quickly switch between active users on the task board. We expect this to be quite popular in your daily scrums.

We have also added two new colors, Orange and Brown, for your work items.

As usual, we invite everyone to download and install the latest version. We can’t wait to hear from you about these new features, particularly regarding the task board improvements. So don’t wait, and get it while it’s hot! And don’t forget to visit our community site to share comments, ask questions and report issues!

The turtle ride continues, 6 releases in 6 months!
Team Urban Turtle is once again proud to announce the release of a new version of Urban Turtle. We’ve received a lot of feedback from our customers and partners and we’ve worked hard to show our appreciation to all the turtle aficionados out there!

Burndown filtered according to selected area
John, this one’s for you! …and for many other people who have told us it would be great if the real-time burndown in Urban Turtle would take into account the currently selected area, like it does the selected iteration.

Support for Readers
Not everyone who needs access to Urban Turtle should have the appropriate rights to actually edit work items. Urban Turtle did not always play nice with people having limited access rights, such as people in the default TFS Readers group. You can now safely allow anyone to take a look at your team’s progress. Urban Turtle automatically activates drag and drop and editing capabilities according to the user’s access rights.

Per-project activation
Want to test drive Urban Turtle with a pilot project without impacting the other projects on your server? No problem! Urban Turtle can now be set to appear only for projects specified in a configuration file. This one’s strictly for administrative purposes. Contact us for more information about how to use this feature. Urban Turtle is still a next-next-next experience, meaning click through the installation wizard and the turtle is ready to go! All projects have access to Urban Turtle by default.

Improvements and fixed issues
We’re not perfect. We make mistakes. And we embrace opportunities to improve our development process and our product!

Urban Turtle now automatically selects the first valid configuration mapping file for your project. We’ve improved the session management and the favorite iterations/areas feature. The footer now displays important information about your license. And everyone can uninstall the product (when you need to upgrade to the latest version, of course!). We also fixed this, this, this and several other issues. And for a lot these improvements, we have you to thank for your feedback. You guys are awesome!

There is simply no reason not to try Urban Turtle! So give it a shot and download Urban Turtle 3.5 today! And, as always, we strongly encourage you to take the time and send us questions and comments either directly or through our community support site. Any kind of comments, good and bad. We just want to improve and create a better product, release after release, and we just cannot do it without you!

Team Urban Turtle is again proud to announce a new release: Urban Turtle 3.2. This new version features support for the Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template from Microsoft, along with filtering of iterations and areas.

Support for Visual Studio Scrum 1.0
Urban Turtle 3.2 fully supports the new Scrum template from Microsoft from the get-go. This post introduces the new features that have been developed for the template, but I strongly recommend that you take some time to read this previous entry to understand the reasoning behind them. Most of these features can be configured to work with other process templates.

New Feature: Approval
Product Owners can now approve PBIs with a single click when looking at their backlog in the Planning Board.

New Feature: Commitment
We made it possible to commit to PBIs contained in a sprint with a single click, again from the Planning Board.

New Feature: Sprint Details
We’ve made it easy to create and access the Sprint work item through the Sprint Details button in the planning board’s iteration list.

New Feature: Favorite iterations and areas
As Dom mentionned before, we have been looking at ways to reduce the number of iterations and areas visible at any time. We’ve come up with a great idea which actually is not our idea at all. I mean, favorites is anything but new in software! Basically, you can now easily switch between viewing all iterations/areas where you can flag some of them as favorites, and then hop back to a view where only favorite iterations/areas are displayed. This effectively reduces the number of work items displayed at once and helps you focus on the task at hand.

Once again, we recommend that everyone upgrades to this latest version and we are eagerly awaiting your feedback. Let us know what you think in our community-powered support site!

In the past, we’ve made claims that Urban Turtle supports virtually any process template. Therefore it came as a surprise to some people when our team said that building support for the new TFS Scrum template from Microsoft would take almost an entire two-week sprint. I’d like to take some time to tell you what we think means to be template-independent and how it differs from building true support for a process template.

Supporting MSF Agile 5.0
Urban Turtle 3.0 shipped with built-in support for MSF Agile 5.0 out of the box. We obviously assume most people using Urban Turtle have chosen this template because of this build in support. This template made it a challenge for us to implement a three-column task board because work items only have one Active state. Items are either active or they’re resolved or closed. Back then, we decided to use the AssignedTo field to determine where the work item should appear when it is active. An unassigned and active task should show up in the To Do column while an assigned and still active task would appear in the In Progress column. It made sense to us as we’re Scrum practitioners and we believe tasks should be unassigned until someone actually starts working on them.

While implementing support for MSF Agile 5.0, we made sure to externalize everything that seemed template-specific, like the state mapping for the task board columns or the stack rank (backlog priority) field. We then claimed to be template-independent, but some assumptions would later turn out to be wrong.

False Assumptions
When Microsoft announced the beta release of their TFS Scrum 1.0 process template, we figured we could quickly create a new mapping file to add support for it. We began analyzing the new template and we realized we couldn’t do it without touching the code base. Honestly, it would have been as easy as we thought but the decision by the Microsoft team, to stay true to the Scrum terminology, turned out to be a blocker for us.

When working on the initial release of  Urban Turtle 3.0, we made the assumption that system fields such as Id, State and AssignedTo would not be configurable. That was a mistake. Microsoft decided not to use the AssignedTo field used to determine who’s working on a task and opt to go with a field named OwnedBy. The vocabulary makes tons of sense but the change made it impossible to use Urban Turtle as it was with the new template.

When basic is not enough
This change was all that was required to build basic support for TFS Scrum with a new mapping file. We could easily define what fields should show up where, what states should appear in the task board columns, etc. We built this basic support within a single day, including refactoring the application code to support configuration for the AssignedTo field. However, we found such basic support to be somewhat lacking.

We started testing the application with the new template and we quickly realized that the state mappings pretty much made the task board impossible to use with Product Backlog Items and Bugs. These two types have the following states: New, Approved, Committed, Done and Removed. We ignored the latter and configured the first three to show up in both the To Do and In Progress columns and mapped the Done state to the Done column. However, the transitions configured between the three active states made us realize that only the Committed state actually made sense in the task board.

We thought that choosing to hide new and approved work items from the task board would cause confusion when users would look at their task board and search for missing items. That’s when we decided to implement two new features to facilitate the state transitions.

New Feature: Approval
Product Owners can now approve PBIs with a single click when looking at their backlog in the Planning Board. This feature can be configured as a state transition in the mapping file and could be used with other process templates. In the case of the TFS Scrum template, we’ve mapped the New -> Approved transitions for PBIs and Bugs to the Approval feature.

New Feature: Commitment
Approved work items still don’t show up in the task board. The task board is used to track work being done during a sprint. The team should never be working on something they haven’t committed to yet. It makes perfect sense with regards to Scrum. We could have implemented this feature the same way we did with the Approval, but while a Product Owner usually approves items one by one, a team commits to a set of PBIs. For that reason, we decided to make this a batch process. We therefore made it possible to commit to PBIs contained in a sprint with a single click, again from the Planning Board. This feature can be customized by defining the state transition that should be triggered when this feature is used.

New Feature: Sprint Details
The last thing we wanted to add to our initial support of  TFS Scrum was a way to manage the new Sprint work item type. This type was defined as a way to work around limitations in TFS regarding Iteration nodes metadata. It defines begin and end dates for the sprint, as well as sprint goal and retrospective details. We’ve made it easy to create and access this work item through the Sprint Details button in the planning board’s iteration list. This button only appears when the Sprint work item type is defined in the mapping, another customizable option.

Beta Release
It has been a mere two weeks since the release of  TFS Scrum 1.0 Beta (Visual Studio Scrum) and we are ready to give you a taste of the support we’ve built for it in Urban Turtle with the beta release of Urban Turtle 3.2. We hope that you will take the time to give it a try and we are looking forward to hearing from you  as we strive to improve the Turtle and accomplish our mission to enable your team to create kick-ass software – fast and sustainably.

We’re proud to announce that Urban Turtle version 3.1 is now available for download! Team Urban Turtle has been hard at work since the release of Urban Turtle 3.0 and the latest version is a true showcase of all the efforts we put in this product during every sprint.

Key highlights of Urban Turtle 3.1 include:

Support for Areas
Areas are now supported in Urban Turtle. Just like iterations, you can easily organize your backlog using areas with a simple drag and drop.

Ranking across multiple pages
We’ve designed a more convenient way to rank stories across multiple pages in the planning board. We’ve replaced the concept of pages with one of card stacks. While the stack itself cannot be moved and its number of stories is fixed, you can easily expand them with a single click and push a card onto the stack with a simple drag and drop. We feel this implementation is much more akin to how a product owner would manage a large set of user stories written onto index cards. We hope you feel the same way, but if you don’t, please do ensure that your voice gets heard in our forums!

List View Display Option
In the planning board, a new option allows you to select whether the area or the iteration should be displayed on the card.

Reduced installation footprint
We’ve always had the goal to minimize Urban Turtle’s impact on TFS installations. We were looking for the smoothest way to append our Planning Board and Task Board tabs to the TWA interface. The result in this new version is a single configuration change in TWA’s web.config file.

Quick access to reports
We’ve added a shortcut on the toolbar to have direct access to project reports from the planning and task boards. We have plans to go much further by providing access to real-time reports right inside the planning or task board tabs. We are convinced that your feedback and incremental steps will guide us in the right direction!

We love to hear from you and we love even more to validate that we deliver software that truly fits the needs of our users.

We recommend everyone already using Urban Turtle 3.0 to upgrade to this new version. For others who have not yet taken the red pill to transport their team to a world where they are enabled to create user-delighted software fast and sustainably, please give it a try by requesting your free 30-day trial.

Team Urban Turtle is proud to announce that Urban Turtle 3.0 has sim-shipped alongside Team Foundation Server 2010 and is now available for download. During the last two weeks, we’ve been hard at work to fully support the RTM version of TFS 2010. We also manage to squeeze in several UI changes to correct various graphical glitches. We firmly believe this is by far the best version ever of Urban Turtle. We look forward to hearing from everyone about this release!

Urban Turtle 3.0 was designed with the idea that the user should be free to use any process template he sees fit. In order to shield us from the details of each template, we are introducing what we call configuration mapping files that sit between Urban Turtle and the process template. And since different projects can use different templates, we needed a way to specify which mapping file should be used by each project.

To specify the mapping file for your project, launch Team Web Access, choose your project and open the Planning Board. In the iteration panel to the left, you will find the project iteration box now sports an icon with a hammer on it. This is the shortcut to the configuration page.

Click on it to get to the configuration page. From there, all you have to do is select the mapping file to use and click Apply. A validation process helps you determine which mapping files are compatible with your project’s template so that you run into errors when accessing Urban Turtle’s boards.

- Louis