Urban Turtle's blog

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?

There will be no rest for our team during the hottest months of the year. Today, we launch Urban Turtle 3.3. This new version includes an hour burndown chart along with some ergonomics, navigation and performance enhancements.

Real-time Hour Burndown Chart. Now with TFS Basic!

Will we be able to respect our engagement? Every Agile team wants to answer this question fast and with certainty. To answer this question, there is no better tool than an hour burndown chart. Based on remaining hours of work in the sprint, the most accurate type of burndown chart is now available in Urban Turtle for your Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 projects.

Click the “Burndown” button, Urban Turtle reads the sprint Start Date and End Date from the Sprint work item type (which you can easily create with Urban Turtle) and shows you a chart based on real time data. In other words, our report is based on the work item repository and does not need the TFS warehouse and Reporting Services to be installed and configured. This feature is therefore available on every instance of Team Foundation Server 2010, including TFS Basic.

New Feature: Work Item Types Filter

The planning board now displays a button bar that allows users to filter the cards displayed.  Different views for different roles; your Product owner could now focus on the Product Backlog Items, your Scrum Master on impediments and the team… on Tasks. Each work item type used and configured in your project can be selected and this feature is available for all process templates.

New Feature: Persistent Settings
Urban Turtle can now retrieve the last iteration and area that you were previously working on. No need to re-click the same old links before the daily anymore. Just sign in and Urban Turtle displays your favorite view of the backlog.

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

If you attend the Agile 2010 conference, do not miss the chance to see a demo in person of these cool features. Come meet members of the Urban Turtle team at booth 128.

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!

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!

The development team is proud to announce today the release of Urban Turtle 2.1, our Agile project management tool for Team System Web Access.

This new version features a simplified installation process that provides built-in support for your TFS projects based on the Conchango or MFS Agile  templates without any additional configuration! Changes also include improved charts display as well as the work item creation by using Web Access form. The area support has also been improved by automatically associating new work items with the currently selected area. French language support is now pervasive throughout the application, from compatibility with french installations of TFS to browser language changes detection.

As with all our releases, several minor bug fixes are also included.

For more information, please review the latest release notes on the download page.

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