Urban Turtle's blog

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.

} dominic

La structure du tableau de planification d’Urban Turtle permet de gagner beaucoup de temps par rapport à l’utilisation de l’interface classique de Team System Web Access. Grâce à la représentation des éléments de travail de TFS sous forme de cartes, tous les déplacements dans Urban Turtle se font par un simple glisser-déposer (drag and drop) d’un endroit à l’autre. Il est possible d’éditer plusieurs cartes à la fois en les sélectionnant à l’aide d’un <CTRL+clic> ou en utilisant le lien Sélectionner : Tout dans l’en-tête. Les accès rapides aux options de filtrage de base permettent de préciser la sélection selon les assignations, l’état et le type de carte.

Une des fonctionnalités des plus intéressantes du tableau de planification c’est la possibilité de prioriser son carnet de produit. En glissant simplement les cartes les une sur les autres, il est alors beaucoup plus facile de prioriser une série d’éléments de travail dans le carnet de produit sélectionné car il n’est plus nécessaire d’ouvrir et d’éditer les éléments de travail un par un pour en changer la priorité. On peut aussi déplacer plus simplement une sélection de cartes dans une autre itération ou zone selon le type de planification désiré.

En cours de sprint, le tableau de tâches facilite le travail de suivi du ScrumMaster et de son équipe en affichant dans une même vue comportant trois colonnes une association de toutes les sous-tâches d’un scénario utilisateur (user story). Chacune des trois colonnes affiche la somme des estimations en heures pour les éléments de travail qu’elle contient. À chaque rencontre journalière, l’équipe peut donc facilement évaluer le temps nécessaire pour compléter le scénario utilisateur.

Le plugiciel Urban Turtle a été conçu pour se greffer au module d’éléments de travail de Microsoft Team Foundation Server à partir de Team System Web Access pour faciliter l’utilisation des éléments de travail dans un contexte de travail avec l’approche Scrum.

Pierre-Yves

The other day, I saw something that’s often missing in Agile teams. I was so astonished by it that I decided to immortalize the moment in a picture.

It’s true, on the Urban Turtle team, the product owner often sits with the developers to ensure that his vision is shared by the rest of the team. In this particular picture, we can see Dominic Danis, the product owner, sitting down with Nicolas Henin, a developer, to explain how he thinks reports in Urban Turtle should be presented to the user. Furthermore, since Dominic is a retired developer, he sometimes itches to dig into the code or the technical stuff. It is quite fun to work in a team where every member cares deeply about the success of the product, no matter his or her role.