Urban Turtle's blog

This morning Microsoft started the Tech·Ed 2011 conference in Atlanta, Georgia. They showcase a broad array of technology during the Keynote Address. If you missed it live, the video is available to watch on-demand now here. Even if you cannot attend in person the conference, there are no reasons why you cannot participate remotely. I am very excited to announce that Microsoft will bring the Tech·Ed 2011 Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) discussions to you with a live broadcast and twitter stream to handle incoming questions.

As a reader of this blog, I am inviting you to remotely participate in the two Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions that I will lead.

BOF09-DEV Is Scrum better for My Projects?
Discussion leader: Mario Cardinal
Wednesday, May 18 | 8:30 AM – 9:45 AM | Room: B209
Have you thought about, or are you using Scrum as a project management framework for agile software development? Jump start your learning or, if you’re a Scrum veteran, share what you have learned with fellow developers. Discuss the strengths and weaknesses, best practices, pitfalls, and more with in this session.

BOF17-DEV Agile Development: Can it Work for Everyone?
Discussion leader: Mario Cardinal and Phil Japikse
Thursday May 19 | 1:00 PM – 2:15 PM | Room: B209
As software developers, engineers, and craftsmen, we are focusing more and more on improving the code that we write, shifting from mere Delivery to Code Elegance. But our customers typically want the lowest cost, fastest to market option. Whether you are struggling with this issue or your team has found the perfect solution, join us to learn (and to share) how to manage this balance.

Use the following link to view the live broadcast of my sessions. Along side the live broadcast there will be a Twitter widget displaying all the inbound tweets during the session. Submit your questions or comments which will be read to the session participants using the hashtags #bofdev. Anyone can submit a question or comment using Twitter during a session. Simply include the hashtag #bofdev in your tweet

Follow @techedbof on Twitter for more information and up-to-the-minute updates on the Birds of a Feather sessions at Tech·Ed.

Are you attending Microsoft Tech·Ed 2011 conference next week in beautiful Atlanta, Georgia? Please, do not missed this great session featuring Urban Turtle.

DEV271-INT Would You, Could You with TFS
Speaker: Richard Hundhausen
Thursday, May 19 | 8:30 AM – 9:45 AM | Room: B301
You’re considering Team Foundation Server, or perhaps you have already deployed it. You think you know what it is capable of, but do you? Microsoft built in many extensibility points which developers have used to build interesting and useful add-ons. These solutions include tools for managing requirements, product and sprint backlogs, work items, and software deployments. In this session, we discuss the partner ecosystem and demonstrate some of these products. See how to go beyond the out-of-the-box capabilities of Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server without custom development or going to other ALM platforms.

Furthermore, if you want to learn more about agility, here are two Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions that I will lead.

BOF09-DEV Is Scrum better for My Projects?
Discussion leader: Mario Cardinal
Wednesday, May 18 | 8:30 AM – 9:45 AM | Room: B209
Have you thought about, or are you using Scrum as a project management framework for agile software development? Jump start your learning or, if you’re a Scrum veteran, share what you have learned with fellow developers. Discuss the strengths and weaknesses, best practices, pitfalls, and more with in this session.

BOF17-DEV Agile Development: Can it Work for Everyone?
Discussion leader: Mario Cardinal and Phil Japikse
Thursday May 19 | 1:00 PM – 2:15 PM | Room: B209
As software developers, engineers, and craftsmen, we are focusing more and more on improving the code that we write, shifting from mere Delivery to Code Elegance. But our customers typically want the lowest cost, fastest to market option. Whether you are struggling with this issue or your team has found the perfect solution, join us to learn (and to share) how to manage this balance.

Do not hesitate to say hello, either at these sessions or simply by stopping at the Microsoft booth. I will hang around the Microsoft® Team Foundation Server 2010 demo station during the week.

Urban Turtle users often ask about why they do not have access to the real-time hour burndown introduced in version 3.5. While somewhat technical, the reason is actually pretty simple. Urban Turtle relies entirely upon Team Foundation Server to store any information regarding your project. As you probably know, classification in TFS is based on iterations and areas. Besides the name of the classification node itself, there is no other way to store iteration and/or area metadata. To work around this limitation, popular process templates such as Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 and Scrum for Team System have introduced the Sprint work item type definition. The sole purpose of this work item is to store information regarding your team sprints. Among other things, it lets you specify start and end dates, which are obviously a prerequisite to create a hour burndown chart.

The MSF Agile 5.0 process template does not specify such a work item type. Fortunately, Team Foundation Server is designed to let you customize your project’s template to better reflect your business process. It is therefore rather easy to add a Sprint work item type to an existing MSF Agile 5.0 project. In this blog entry, I will show you how to import the Sprint work item type definition from Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 into an existing MSF Agile 5.0 project.

Prerequisites

Sprint work item type definition
You will need to know the location of the Sprint work item type definition from the Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template. If you haven’t done so already, you can download this process template from the Visual Studio Gallery on MSDN. If you install the process template in the default path, you will find the Sprint definition file (Sprint.xml) under ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0\Process Template\WorkItem Tracking\TypeDefinitions’.

witadmin.exe
Importing a work item type is done through the use of a command-line utility known as witadmin. You must first locate this utility on your computer, preferably on your server hosting Team Foundation Server. If you have Visual Studio 2010 installed, you should be able to launch a Visual Studio Command Prompt from the Start menu, which will allow you to skip searching for the executable file itself. Otherwise, the file can be found by default (on an x64 installation) under ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\witadmin.exe’.

While this article describes how to use the witadmin utility, you could choose to use the Team Foundation Server Power Tools which Mathieu refers to in his Approval feature with MSF Agile 5.0 article.

Importing the Sprint work item type

1. Start by launching a Visual Studio command prompt (if available) or a standard command prompt. If the former is unavailable to you, make sure to navigate to the location of the witadmin utility. Check the prerequisites above to help you locate it.
2. Launch the witadmin utility by specifying the following arguments:

   /collection: The URL of the Team Foundation Server collection that contains the MSF Agile 5.0 project.
   /p: The name of the MSF Agile 5.0 project
   /f: The path of the Sprint.xml file, enclosed in double quotes.

   For example, using the arguments that match your environment, type the following command and press ENTER:
   witadmin importwitd /collection:http://localhost:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection /p:Agile /f:"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0\Process Template\WorkItem Tracking\TypeDefinitions\Sprint.xml"


3. If all goes as expected, the following message will appear: “The work item type import has completed”.

Configuring Urban Turtle to recognize the Sprint work item type
Urban Turtle uses what we call Configuration Mapping Files to deal with differences between process templates. You can create your own mapping file and configure your project to use it. By default, the mapping files can be found under ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Access\Web\UrbanTurtle\configuration\project’. We must advise against editing one of the default files as these get removed when uninstalling the application.

1. Start by copying the MSF Agile 5.0.xml file, and open the copy using any text editor. Locate the
   TemplateConfiguration element at the top of the document and change the Name attribute to something like “MSF Agile 5.0 – Burndown”.
2. For Urban Turtle to recognize the new Sprint work item type, you must add an entry in the mapping file, telling it exactly what work item type represents a Sprint. It could be any type, but it must have fields to contain the start date, end date and a description (or sprint goal). Since we are using the Sprint work item type definition from Visual Studio Scrum 1.0, you can copy the required configuration from the default mapping file for this process template and append it to the Features element.
3. The last step required is to configure your project to use the new mapping file. This is done through the Configuration page in Urban Turtle, accessible from the Configuration option under the Project menu.
   
4. Simply select the new “MSF Agile 5.0 – Burndown” and then click the Apply button to save your selection.
   

Using the Hour Burndown
Displaying the Hour Burndown requires you to create a Sprint work item in the selected iteration. This is made very simple by Urban Turtle just by clicking the Sprint Details icon on the iteration box.

Once you have specified start and end dates for your sprint, you can display the Hour Burndown. First, make sure the iteration is selected in the iteration panel and then click on the Burndown button on the toolbar.

Voilà, a real-time Hour Burndown with MSF Agile 5.0!

As you can see, just about any feature that is not available out of the box with your process template may be enabled by customizing your project and creating a custom configuration mapping file. Some of you may recall that we had already shown how to enable the Recycle bin functionality for MSF Agile 5.0 projects. With these features enabled, MSF Agile 5.0 users have no reason to feel left out when using Urban Turtle!

Assisting teams and organizations adopt Scrum and Agile practices for many years, I have realized, sometimes the hard way that Agile is a culture change. If you are interested in exploring more the topic of cultures and their implications, there are many resources available. I suggest you have a look at Bill Schneider’s work. I also suggest this blog post from Michael Spayd.

I have found Schneider’s core culture model very useful to assess the culture in place in a group that wants to adopt Scrum and Agile. Depending on how much time you want to allow, you can do an intuitive assessment or have some people go through the questionnaire that you can find in the book The Reengineering Alternative. By having the questionnaire by multiple persons at various levels and with various roles in the organizations, you can develop a good understanding of the culture in place. With the assessment results in hand, you have a marvelous tool to drive conversations and start identifying the challenges of the transition to Scrum and Agile and where to focus efforts.

Adopting Agile will certainly bring significant challenges in creating a team/collaboration culture, solid incremental software engineering practices, value driven planning, etc. Therefore, the last thing you want is tooling to get in the way. I have found that people put too much focus on the tooling for managing their scrums and not enough focus on the core issues. My advice, especially in the early stages of a product or project, is to use the tools that will provide the highest level of collaboration and interactions. Those are collaborative sessions where you use flip-charts, post-its, whiteboards, etc. Until we have tools that support a very high level of interactions and allow teams to create story maps and other models collaboratively and efficiently, I think it is wise to stick with those simple tools in those product exploration and definition sessions.

For various reasons, a significant portions of the Scrum / Agile teams will want to use an electronic tool to do planning and tracking. Again, I think the best tools are the ones that do not get in the way of collaboration. As outlined in Scrum and Agile Built Into Microsoft Team Foundation Server I presented how we design Urban Turtle to blend much like a chameleon into the existing environment for organizations that are using Team Foundation Server. The Urban Turtle team is committed to enabling software teams to create kick-ass software fast and we are always striving to make the user experience seamless and simple. Give Urban Turtle a try and please let us know what you think we need to improve in Urban Turtle or what you think we completely got wrong. Please be candid. We have done a release per month (5) since the release of TFS 2010 and intend to continue sustaining this pace. Therefore, there is a high chance that if your suggestion is great, it will be included in the product soon.

I value a lot exchanging points of view and experiences. Please do not hesitate to comment here, or send me an email to setup a live conversation.

In a previous post, Sprints and Compelling Goals, I expressed my opinion on why I think commitment driven planning is much more powerful than capacity planning. In the next post I will present why I think compelling goals drive collaboration and creativity. Stay tuned!

Cheers,
~françois

There has been a debate in the Scrum and Kanban communities about having iterations  (sprints) or not. I am worried that this blog post will generate flame wars and rants. Thus, there will certainly be some energy that will be lost. My hope is that this post will generate real debates and discussions so we can learn from each other’s opinion.

I have been developing software in Scrum for a long time and coaching many teams and organizations adopting Scrum. Therefore, I have been exposed to a lot of situations and feel I have integrated the fundamentals and the theoretical foundations of Scrum.

My general feeling, which you will see expressed throughout this blog post is that the Agile community is falling into the trap of looking for optimizations everywhere and is losing sight of some fundamentals about complexity, creativity, teamwork and commitments.

When I first heard about Kanban, I was intrigued and read about it and even applied it in some situations I felt it could be helpful. There are a couple of nice things that Kanban brings to the table but I also think that it breaks some fundamental things that make Scrum work.

Within sprints, Scrum suggests a simple workflow with sprint backlog items going from ‘To Do’ to ‘In Progress’ to ‘Done’. I have certainly seen some Scrum teams have way too much work ‘In Progress’ and using Kanban techniques to limit the amount of work in progress can certainly help. I also do not think it is necessarily a bad idea that a mature team establishes a more defined workflow and uses Kanban techniques to control its flow of work but going too far (I have seen a Kanban board with 10 columns corresponding to stories’ statuses) in that direction will reduce the possibilities of emergence that creates true performance in self-managing, multidisciplinary teams.

Getting to the actual debate of having sprints or not. Some Scrum proponents say that not having sprints may be problematic because the team needs to hold regular retrospectives to accelerate learning. While I do agree that holding regular retrospectives is absolutely essential, I think that a Kanban team could do regular retrospectives while not completely applying sprints.

I think Ken Schwaber has a much stronger point. In his Waterfall, Lean/Kanban, and Scrum blog post, he presents sprints from the point of view of the complexity theory.

A container is a closed space where things can get done, regardless of the overall complexity of the problem. In the case of Scrum, a container is a Sprint, an iteration. We put people with all the skills needed to solve the problem in the container. We put the highest value problems to be solved into the container. Then we protect the container from any outside disturbances while the people attempt to bring the problem to a solution. We control the container by time-boxing the length of time that we allow the problem to be worked on. We let the people select problems of a size that can be brought to fruition during the time-box. At the end of the time-box, we open the container and inspect the results. We then reset the container (adaptation) for the next time-box. By frequently re-planning and shifting our work, we are able to optimize value.

Vincent also brings an interesting viewpoint in his recent post Scrum is not about project management
.

While explaining the notion of container, Ken mentions above: “We put the highest value problems to be solved into the container.” I would like to push this a little further and relate it to planning and commitment. I have always insisted in my Scrum classes that a successful sprint planning is not about delivering a sprint backlog, it is first and foremost about having a team committed toward a goal that is compelling for them as a whole including the ScrumMaster and Product Owner. I believe, this is one of the fundamentals to create creative hyper-performing, self-managing teams that can sustain.

I have felt during the last few years that as a community we are putting too much focus on the concept of velocity and, therefore, many teams are un-passionately identifying their commitment based on their velocity and do not get to the true nature of what it means to be committed toward a compelling goal.

Before you throw tomatoes at me, I am not saying that measuring velocity is useless. I am saying that while it is useful for a team to measure and be aware of its velocity, I think we let it drive too much the commitment decisions of the team. Some tools are in my opinion putting too much emphasis on using velocity to drive the sprint planning process.

This belief of the importance of being committed toward a compelling goal was reinforced recently while reading the following book: The three laws of performance. Here are the three laws presented in the book:

1. How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.
2. How a situation occurs arises in language.
3. Future-based language transforms how situation occurs to people.

I will not try to summarize the book here. I thought it is useful to mention this reference because I think it links the importance of creating an environment in planning sessions that enables the team to choose a goal that is compelling for them to some fundamentals of human beings.

In summary, I suggest to use sprints as defined in Scrum because when done in the true spirit of Scrum, they enable a team to look at the highest value problems, imagine a compelling future, and use all of the thinking, collaboration, and creativity possible to put together solutions and plans. Then, you leave the people alone within the container of the sprint to apply their professional skills, without interruption so they can concentrate and focus on their work. This is the core of them being creative people doing creative work rather than resources being managed to optimize productivity.

In Answering some common questions about Urban Turtle we answer some questions and present some of the orientations we took in designing Urban Turtle.

One of the main orientation 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.

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.

In the release that we have for you this week (June 2nd), we deliver a bunch of enhancements including a productive way to use Areas. The upcoming release will most likely focus on a feature we call Perspective that will allow you to work seamlessly in Urban Turtle on a subset of work items making it a charm to do multi-teams and grouping projects together. We will also focus on enhancing user experience in a couple of key places.

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

Check out this blog from Microsoft’s Aaron Bjork about Urban Turtle http://bit.ly/b1dh5c.

The Urban Turtle team is proud to finally present the release candidate of our Agile Project Management extension to Team Web Access 2010: Urban Turtle 3.0. This new version sports a brand new look, a streamlined user interface and full support for Team Foundation Server 2010. Make sure to download it and request a free 30-day trial, you’ll find that you can’t do Agile in TFS 2010 without Urban Turtle.

In the last few months, we’ve spent quite some time working on our template support. Out of the box, Urban Turtle supports the MSF Agile 5.0 process template. We’re actually quite proud to introduce what we think is the first and only 3-column task board to work with MSF Agile 5.0 without any modifications.

But what’s even better is that we support virtually any process template through an xml mapping file. We already provide one such file to support MSF Agile 5.0, but new ones can be added to support your own template.

We’re aiming to sim-ship alongside Team Foundation Server 2010 which has just been made available, meaning the RTM version should be ready before the end of the month. Right now, the release candidate has only been tested with TFS 2010 RC. We recommend using Microsoft’s virtual machine to try Urban Turtle 3.0 RC.

We hope you enjoy this latest release, and please do provide some feedback so that we make the turtle even better!

- Louis Pellerin

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.

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