Urban Turtle's blog

So your project has been going along for a while now and several iterations are completed. Your iteration panel is starting to look a little crowded. Maybe something like this:

You start to wonder about how great it would be if you could hide those past iterations so you can focus on the current and future ones. Lucky for you, this Turtle just happens to be wearing a sweater (this is Canada after all) and its sleeves are full of tricks!

There are two possible ways to hide older iterations. The Favorites feature (the stars that you see on each iteration) is the most obvious one to use. Simply click on the star for each iteration that you wish to hide, turning the star grey. Then, click the Apply Favorites button to only show the selected iterations (the ones with the yellow stars). This also works for areas.

However, there is one caveat that you should be aware of. Hiding a large number of iterations using favorites may lead to performance issues as one of our customers has reported on the community. A proposed work-around is to use the Team functionality to hide a part of the iteration tree. You see, teams can be configured to have a distinct root iteration. By default, the project node is the root iteration. If you change the root iteration, the nodes that are not under it will not appear in Urban Turtle. So a recommended solution would be to have a structure similar as the following:

If you make the Current Iterations node the root node for your team, then you won’t see the node Past Iterations or its children. This is a lot faster than hiding individual iterations using the Favorites feature. In Visual Studio, it is possible to move individual nodes. So you could move an iteration that is under Current Iterations to the Past Iterations node when it is complete and it will be hidden from Urban Turtle.

If you look at your own planning board, chances are you won’t find a Team menu as shown in the preceding video. This is because you need to enable it through the global.settings file. For instance, the global.settings file used in this video looks like this:

The documentation for the Team functionality (and the global.settings file) can be found here.

After breaking tradition and our monthly release cycle, Team Urban Turtle is proud to present to you version 3.13 featuring the most requested idea ever!

New Features

• Our planning board has always been agile, but we had it learn some new tricks to make it more flexible than ever. With most process templates, it is now possible to simply drag a work item and drop it anywhere you want. Urban Turtle will take care of figuring the updates required such as removing the current work item link between the item and its parent, creating a new one and prioritizing the work item within its new siblings.
• The iteration panel can now be collapsed, leaving more space for the work items. This was accomplished by inserting the iteration panel inside of the default Team Web Access side-panel. As this is where Team Web Access displays its search bar, users also gain access to search capabilities at the same time.
• With Urban Turtle 3.9, we introduced independent iteration and area settings for the planning and task boards. This change didn’t please everyone, so we decided to turn this itself into a setting. On the iteration and area panel, a pushpin icon has been added. When the pushpin is colored, it is active, forcing iteration and area settings to be retained across both boards. Otherwise, settings are independent.

Improvements

• A few usability improvements have been made to the planning board. Now that the iteration panel can now be hidden, it was obvious we needed to expand work item titles to fill the space. This automatic expanding and truncating of the work time titles is also done when resizing the window. This means that the larger screen resolution that you use, the more you will be able to see of the work item titles.
• A little known feature that has always been present on the planning board is the ability to select multiple work items to drag and drop them on an iteration, an area or the recycle bin. We’ve decided to improve this and highlight this functionality by adding checkboxes on work items. This makes it a lot more obvious that this feature exists. Please note that multi-selection does not apply when reordering work items.We’ve also ported the ability to collapse parent work items from the task board to the planning board.

Fixed Issues

• Users of the french version of the MSF Agile 5.0 process template will be glad to know that we have resolved the issue that prevented adding some child work items. The problem was due to accents in the work item types (such as Tâche).
• We have also fixed an issue preventing moving a work item after the last visible work item on the planning board.

We know that it’s been a long time coming (the ability to change work item links using drag and drop has been requested over a year ago!) and we invite you to download the latest version. Your feedback has always been invaluable to us and we’re very excited to hear what you have to say about this new release. While we already have ideas in mind for the next release, your feedback may still steer our decisions. Don’t hesitate, and voice your opinion on our community support site!

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Benefits of using Urban Turtle in the cloud

• Start working now
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• Control costs
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Another great adventure for the Turtle started today!

Urban Turtle has been designed from the ground up to support custom process templates. Out of the box, we provide support for MSF Agile 5.0 (english and french), Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 and Scrum for Team System v3. However, this support is done through the use of what we call configuration mapping files, xml-based files that effectively map Urban Turtle features to your process template specification.

By default, the mapping files are located under ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Access\Web\UrbanTurtle\configuration\project’. I must advise against editing the default files as they are removed when uninstalling the application, such as when upgrading to a new version. If your project is based off one of the aforementioned process templates, I suggest that you start with a copy of one of the default files.

Among other things. creating a mapping file requires you to declare the work item types that should be visible in Urban Turtle, which fields to display and which states to map to each of the columns of the task board. You can also enable certain features such as the recycle bin which requires you to specify the state that corresponds to the Deleted state, if such a state exist. As you can guess, you should have the work item type definitions of the process template handy if you want to go through with this.

While we don’t have formal documentation for these files, their xml nature is fairly easy to figure out, especially combined with the personalized support that we provide via our community support-site or email. We also have a few online resources:

• Configuring Urban Turtle for customized process templates
• Enabling the real-time burndown with MSF Agile 5.0
• Recycle bin feature in a MSF Agile project
• Approval feature with MSF Agile 5.0

If you need anything else, don’t hesitate to contact me. I also invite you to visit our community site where you’ll find answers to commonly asked questions. You can also propose ideas or report bugs. It is monitored very closely by the team.

Back in November of last year, we released Urban Turtle 3.6 which feature major performance improvements. To achieve this, we used a variety of code profiling tools, including Eqatec Profiler. I really liked the straight-forward interface of the product making it simple to compare profiling reports. A few months later, the Eqatec team emailed me to notify Profiler users about a great offer. Put simply, they offered a free Profiler license if I simply requested a trial license for Eqatec Analytics, a tool used to monitor application usage. I didn’t think much of it at first, but have to admit I find it hard to ignore free stuff. Plus, I was really interested in an automated solution to give us actual usage feedback from Urban Turtle users.

I started the trial and was immediately impressed at how easy it was to plug it in the application code base. A few method calls here and there and I was already looking at a web dashboard showing me what features were being used (on my development machine, mind you). I was particularly interested in the feature timings data. With a few more calls, I was quickly tracking how long some features were taking. I was imagining how useful this would be if it were data from actual users. The advantages to using such a tool are just obvious. You quickly know what versions of your application are being used (you all update to the latest version as soon as it is published, don’t you?), and better yet, what features are actually the most popular. This would be so useful when planning out the next releases. It is crazy to think we haven’t had that in the product since the very beginning.

I really enjoyed my trial and we are looking at how to seamlessly embed this in a future version of the application. All usage data would be anonymous, of course, and we are trying to come up with an opt-in/opt-out scenario. We do not want to force anyone to send us this data, and we understand that a server running a TFS instance may not have access to the internet. However, I am now convinced that having such data even from a minority of users would be of tremendous value to us. And I believe that at least a few of us will agree with me and will be more than willing to help us deliver a better turtle, release after release.

This week, Urban Turtle was at the DevTeach conference in Montreal.

We’ve met a lot of interesting people and TFS users. One thing to note is that many people are just starting to use the Work Item Tracking feature of TFS and they were very interested in trying out Urban Turtle. They were especially happy to know that they didn’t have to make a full switch from the tools they already know and use, such as Excel, since Urban Turtle stores everything in TFS. Some people even told us that Urban Turtle was the big piece of the puzzle missing from the default TFS offering. We like to agree!

Team Urban Turtle is proud to announce the release of Urban Turtle 3.12. During the last month, we’ve focused on further improving support for the Scrum for Team System v3 process template, as well as adding a few template-agnostic goodies for everyone.

Scrum for Team System v3
Implementing support Scrum for Team System (hereafter SfTS for brevity) proves to be an interesting challenge for us. As we strive to protect our template independence, there are many particularities with this template that force us to jump through hoops in order to provide a compelling solution for SfTS users. We’ve introduced the Direct Links query mode in Urban Turtle xx, to support the various link types found in SfTS. We have also added the ability to configure a Sprint work item type per iteration level, to support the Release, Sprint and Team Sprint work item types. Now, we are adding the ability to automatically link these work item types together via the Implemented-By link type, as prescribed by the SfTS guidance.

The default configuration file for SfTS specifies the relationship between the different link types. In Urban Turtle, when you add a Sprint work item to an iteration, it automatically looks up the chain of iterations to find the Sprint work item it should link to. This is all done automatically, behind the scenes, but it requires you to create the Sprint work items in the expected order. This means that you should first create a Release, then a Sprint, and finally, a Team Sprint. Doing so will automatically link the Sprint to the Release, and the Team Sprint to the Sprint, enabling all the cool roll-up features and calculated fields found in Scrum for Team System. To make things a bit easier, iterations without a Sprint work item can now be quickly spotted just by looking at the iteration panel.

We’ve also added the last missing piece in the SfTS feature tracking work item model: the Acceptance Test. This work item type links Bugs to Product Backlog Items but it was missing from the default SfTS configuration file that ships with Urban Turtle. This means that you can now have Product Backlog Items tested by Acceptance Tests failed by Bugs as suggested in the process guidance.

We believe this extended linking support will be more than welcome by current users of the Scrum for Team System process template as they make Urban Turtle a compelling alternative solution to the TFS Workbench from EMC Consulting.

And the goodies!
Most of our current customers rely on the common process templates from Microsoft: MSF Agile 5.0 and Visual Studio Scrum 1.0. If you’re using one of these templates, you can still benefit from the features added specifically for Scrum for Team System, as every new functionality is implemented in a template-independent way. For instance, you can switch to the Direct Links query mode to add support for custom link types. You can configure the relationship between the different work item types to prevent users from adding User Stories to Tasks. Any feature that is unavailable with the default configuration file can be added by modifying your process template and creating your own custom configuration mapping file. But Urban Turtle 3.12 also introduces a few features that work with any process template and do not require any tinkering with the configuration files.

• Ordering of new child items
  With prior versions of Urban Turtle, new child items always appeared on top, with a seemingly higher priority. This doesn’t make much sense for a lot of users as most people tend to create tasks in the order they believe they should be completed. Urban Turtle 3.12 now sets a default backlog priority or stack rank for new child work items at a value higher than the last visible item.
• Improved Pagination
  Experienced Urban Turtle users know that the options in the Cards per Stack menu on the planning board refer to the number of parent or root work items and not to the number of visible work items. This means that you could choose to display 25 Cards per Stack but actually see a lot more work items because all the descendants of each of the visible parent work items would also be displayed. This could severely impact loading times when accessing either board. Furthermore, there was no Cards per Stack option for the task board, as it doesn’t use the stack metaphor.

  In Urban Turtle 3.12, we have decided to change the pagination logic by applying the Cards per Stack selection to visible work items. One caveat to be aware of is that you will always see all descendants of a parent work item no matter how many there are. However, as soon as we hit the chosen Cards per Stack limit, the next parent is pushed to the next stack. This means that it will still be possible to view more than the selected number of work items, but the count should never get unreasonably high.

  We have also ported the same pagination logic to the task board, including the Cards per Stack menu (renamed Cards per Page on the task board). This should also help improve load times as the pagination applies to all displayed work items unlike previous versions which had separate logics for the parent and the Other Work Items sections.

As usual, we recommend that everyone upgrades to the latest version. We are looking forward to your feedback! Please visit our community support-site to ask questions, propose ideas or report issues. It is monitored very closely by the team and you will get timely replies to any inquiry.

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!

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!

Team Urban Turtle has finally arrived in Redmond to present our agile project management tool after a long trip yesterday. It all started with a six-hour flight from Montreal to Vancouver, a two-hour car trip, including a stop at the US customs waiting for Mathieu to fill in the VISA stuff. Apparently, when you are French and try to enter the US from here, you need to be patient and have 6 bucks in your pocket, in USD of course.

We finally arrived at the hotel at 1 AM, ready to go sleep!

This morning we took our boat, a Lincoln Town Car, to come to the Summit in building 33, with our friend ET.

People come to see us to congratulate us about our 7th release in 7 months. Being able to do this in the product business is pretty tough, and we are happy that the community recognized that !

Ken Schwaber opened the summit with a talk about ALM and Scrum not being sufficient for Agility.

Agility Requires:

1. An organizational culture change. François gave a great presentation about this at the Agile Tour.
2. Good engineering practices.
3. Continuous Improvement.
4. Reactivity, persistence, hard work and headaches, vision and insights.

Next talk: The state of ALM: An industry view, by David West.