Urban Turtle's blog

Here is another proof that a hosted TFS is an option becoming increasingly affordable and feasible. We recently partnered up with DiscountASP.NET, the leader in Microsoft ASP.NET web hosting and Team Foundation Server (TFS) hosting. Under this partnership, DiscountASP.NET introduces a hosted version of our Urban Turtle solution which is available to their TFS hosting customers as an add-on. In addition, DiscountASP.NET customers get a 10% discount for on-premise Urban Turtle licenses. Customers can get more information on how to redeem this offer through the marketplace section in their control panel.

We launched our hosted TFS service last year and Urban Turtle was a popular request from our customers. We are excited to partner with Urban Turtle for a hosted implementation of their agile management tool.” said Takeshi Eto, VP Marketing and Business Development at DiscountASP.NET.

At Urban Turtle, we think this is a great solution for teams of all sizes as well as first-time TFS users. Since there is no difference between an on-premise or hosted Urban Turtle solution, the learning curve is significantly reduced.

You can read the Press Release announcing the partnership here

To learn more about this hosted version, visit http://www.discountasp.net/tfs/.

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!

Yesterday, we got a Christmas present from Brian Harry, the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server and a Microsoft Technical Fellow. He wrote a blog where he praises Urban Turtle.

Urban Turtle is a TFS add-on built by Pyxis Technologies and it provides an awesome Scrum experience for TFS. For 10 years, Pyxis has been at the forefront of the evolving Agile development practices and has been helping companies transform their development process to be more Agile and more effective. We were thrilled when they decided to take that expertise and create a top notch Scrum experience for TFS.

You can read the full story here: Urban Turtle for Scrum and TFS

8 months, 8 releases
The team is back at it again. Another month sees another release out in the wild. We’re once again quite proud to have been able to stick to our monthly release cycle, but we’re even more proud of what you will actually find in this new version. ‘Tis the season and Santa has something for every member of your Scrum team!

A more agile task board
Our previous release included various performance improvements but most of them simply went unnoticed because of the tremendous gains asynchronous ranking brought forth. While this really helped during planning and backlog grooming sessions, some team members might have felt left out. We’ve therefore decided to take everything we’ve learnt developing this feature and apply it to the task board. No longer will you wait for the dreaded spinner to disappear when moving work items through the task board columns. Everything gets updated asynchronously and state transitions are now swift and smooth.

But this is not the only improvement the task board has received. Users loved the automatic assignment feature, which assigns tasks moved to the In Progress column to the currently logged-in user. While this was quite useful for team members during the day, it proved somewhat annoying during stand-up meetings. We decided to implement an idea from a member of our community which described a way to select an active user on the task board. Instead of assigning tasks to the logged-in user, we now assign them to the selected user. We’ve further enhanced this feature by adding the option of highlighting the selected user’s tasks.

One more feature that we expect will be very appreciated by developers on your team is the ability to specify work remaining on the work item card itself. No longer do you have to open the work item editor, edit the work remaining field, save and close and wait for a full task board refresh. In-place editing turns a chore into pure joy! Sure, you will start hoping right away for the ability to edit other fields in the same way, but rest assured, this is only a glimpse of a bright and exciting future!

Hopefully, these improvements to the task board will make the turtle a little more daily-friendly!

Improved Planning
We’ve turned a long requested feature into reality with this new version. Actually, this idea was originally mentioned by a previous member of our team, before the initial 3.0 release. It has taken some time but the iteration/area and work items sections on the planning board have been split into two and no longer share a single scrollbar. This means that you can now take the last work item on your backlog and move it to the top-level area without feeling any pain in your hand!

Goodbye, session timeouts!
It is quite common for developers to leave the task board open in the background and come back to it after having completed a task. What would then happen is that they’d try to move their task to the Done column only to see the task board being refreshed, and their task still sitting under In Progress. A frustrating sigh later, the card would be moved a second time to the Done column, hopefully sticking to it this time. The cause of this was a simple session timeout. Fortunately, a combination of many changes made throughout the different releases enabled us to actually complete the intended action even when the session is expired. This is only one example of a frustrating moment caused by session timeouts, but other actions will also successfully complete, such as moving a work item to an iteration.

Miscellaneous Improvements
Several other changes can be found in this release. For instance, the number of cards per stack can now be changed through a new menu option. Switching between viewing the iteration or the area on a card on the planning board is now instantaneous. Data for the next day (tomorrow) is no longer displayed on the burndown chart.

We’re also including a beta version of our configuration mapping file for the Scrum for Team System v3 process template. We know this is a popular template and we hope users will try it and send us feedback so that we can further improve our support for it.

Courtesy of the Turtle Hospital

Once again, we recommend to everyone to upgrade to the latest version. We will eagerly be waiting for your comments. As usual, make sure your voice gets heard on our community-powered support site. The weather outside might be frightful, but the turtle is delightful. This season, present your team with the gift of the turtle and witness joy, daily!

The Turtle in the Cloud has reached its destination which is the ALM Summit. Urban Turtle is a gold sponsor at this event which will be targeting TFS and Agile project management using Scrum.

Now that Urban Turtle is available in the cloud, we are proud to confirm that it is even easier to adopt. Our partner, PRAKTIK Hosting, has just updated their hosting offering to provide an option for licensing Urban Turtle on top of TFS 2010. PRAKTIK Hosting is an established company that specializes in Microsoft Visual Studio technologies and is a premier provider of hosted Microsoft Team Foundation Server services.

Why is the cloud of interest. Because it is quick, easy, fast, and increasingly simple. These as well as other obvious trends confirm that offering Urban Turtle as a hosted service makes a lot of sense. Here are some of the major benefits:

• Be up and running now! (in less than a day if you take your time)
• No need to invest in expensive hardware and software
• No need to purchase costly bulk licences
• No need to worry about maintenance, backups, and security
• Developers in different locations are able to collaborate efficiently

PRAKTIK Hosting is offering two plans for agile project management with TFS:

1. TFS Basic with Urban Turtle:  $35 per user/month
2. TFS Standard with Urban Turtle: $70 per user/month (if more than 10 users)

The investment to start using Urban Turtle is really small. PRAKTIK Hosting takes care of everything. They even offer a 30-day free trial licence if you have any doubts.

We think it is a great solution for teams of all sizes and first-time TFS users. One of the cool things is that, for the end user, Urban Turtle as a hosted solution is the same as on-premises, no differences. All you have to do is work on your projects and use Urban Turtle to plan and track them.

This week (from November 16 to 18) the Urban Turtle team is at the ALM Summit which takes place on the campus of Microsoft in Redmond, WA. We are proud to be a Gold sponsor at this event which will be targeting TFS and agile project management using Scrum.

During that conference, we will officially announce the availability of Urban Turtle as a hosted solution through our partner PRAKTIK Hosting.

Furthermore, I will speak during that event about extending the ALM platform.

Extending the ALM Platform – Mario Cardinal
Discover how third-party vendors fill the gaps and add value to the Microsoft’s ALM platform. Whether you need Outlook integration, Agile planning or release management, there is a solution available today. Learn the criteria for evaluating how third-party products integrate seamlessly with your ALM platform. Overall, discover how to build an ALM platform that enable the whole team (Stakeholders, Analysts, Developers, and Testers) to work together to produce quality products.

If you are attendees, visit us at our booth. We look forward to meet you during the ALM Summit.

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!