Urban Turtle's blog

A few customers have inquired about how Urban Turtle handles being set up in a load balancing scenario. I thought it would be interesting to describe the current state of affairs on our blog to share with the rest of world.

When it comes to load balancing, there are some issues that you should be aware of. These are described in the following topics on our community support site:

• Urban Turtle on load balanced application servers?
• Setting up Urban Turtle on multiple TFS app servers.

Scott Hanselman has a great summary of some of the things that you should take under consideration when dealing with multiple web servers. In most cases, the first scenario is really the one that applies to us: Urban Turtle uses an in-process session state which requires a particular load balancing setup to work properly. The problem is caused by client requests (user actions in the application, such as selecting an iteration) being processed by different servers. Imagine that the user clicks on the Planning board tab. This request is processed by Server A which was picked by the Load Balancer. Then, the user selects an iteration. This request is handled by Server B, which the Load Balancer picked because Server A was determined to be busy. Urban Turtle stores the selected iteration on Server B, which Server A is unaware of. Therefore, when the user requests the Hour Burndown, if Server A processes this requests, it will not be aware that another iteration was selected and will return the Hour Burndown for the wrong iteration, causing confusion.

The first solution would be to configure sticky sessions/connections or client affinity. The term used may vary depending on your load balancing application vendor. This basically ensures that all requests from the same client are routed to the same server. Thus, the client always uses the same session state and therefore, the same Urban Turtle application settings.

Another solution would be to use a State Server. This is something that you may already have set up for other applications in your infrastructure, but I wouldn’t know about that. In this scenario, session data is stored in another process, on another server and is shared by all web servers in the load balancing environment. Urban Turtle has never been tested in such a scenario. It requires that all data stored in the session state be serializable and I cannot guarantee this as Urban Turtle was not designed with this in mind.

Here are some links regarding load balancing and session state:

• Load Balancing and ASP.NET
• Understanding session state modes + FAQ
• How to keep user requests on the same server when using IIS NLB?
• Configure a State Server to Maintain Session State (IIS 7)

I hope this helps. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Once again, Team Urban Turtle is quite proud to announce the release of Urban Turtle 3.14. Featuring updated visuals and the ability to fill a backlog or decompose a product backlog item in seconds, we’re pretty sure you’ll be as excited as we are about this new version.

New Design
While strictly an aesthetic update, the new planning and task board design in Urban Turtle 3.14 was also aimed at improving the visibility of the boards when displayed using a projector. The original design, albeit attractive on paper, turned the Turtle into a Christmas tree (actual user comments!) when used in the real world. Even though it has always been a concern for us, we chose to concentrate on developing new features since the 3.0 release. This update was long overdue, and this is why we tasked our web guy, Guillaume, to come up with a new look for the application. We’re very happy with the results and we hope you will be too! We can’t wait to hear what you think about it. It may be disconcerting at first, as with any major change, but given time, we’re convinced you’ll find the new look to be quite easier on the eyes. Can’t go wrong with less eye bleeding, right?

Quick Add
We know for a fact that our users tend to avoid round-trips to the Work Item Editor window in Team Web Access like the plague. And with good reasons! It is painfully slow to render and it forces a planning or task board refresh when closed. This is why we try to come up with features that avoid having to go through this window.

Urban Turtle 3.14 introduces the Quick Add section which aims to make the user story/product backlog item decomposition part of your Sprint Planning meetings an actual joy to do. It allows you to add tasks to a PBI in a matter of seconds, without ever going through the Work Item Editor. Simply type in the work item title, press enter and a new work item appears immediately. What’s really cool about this is that you don’t need to wait for the work item to actually be created in TFS. The creation part is all done asynchronously, so you can just continue to type in work item titles and press enter. Combined with the in-place editing capabilities, creating tasks and setting the work remaining is no longer the chore it used to be.

The Turtle is very excited to show its new colors and the speed it has picked up when creating work items. We invite you to update to the latest version and discuss it on our community-powered support site.

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!

TFS Server Hosting is now offering Urban Turtle to all their clients for free. We are
proud to add another great partner to our list. Hosting solutions can help you be
ready to code really fast and focus on delivering value to your business immediately.

Have a look at their offer at www.tfsserver.com.

Benefits of using Urban Turtle in the cloud

• Start working now
  Be up and running in less than 5 minutes.
• Deliver software
  Focus on delivering software. Forget about maintenance, backup, and security hassles.
• Control costs
  Spread your investment over time and simplify your cost management.

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

To help you get started, here are a few examples of custom configuration that you can play with:

• Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 and the Test Case work item type
• MSF Agile 5.0 (english) and the Test Case work item type
• MSF CMMI

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.

Remember our 12in12 contest? We received an update from France this morning. Well the big, big winner, Christophe Heral just sent us the picture of his new Xbox. Look at his smile.

Thanks for sending us your photo Christophe.

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.

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.