Pyxis blog » dominic danis

Urban Turtle is proud to announce a partnership with TFS Server Hosting.

dominic danis — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:13:28 +0000

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 nowBe up and running in less than 5 minutes.
Deliver softwareFocus on delivering software. Forget about maintenance, backup, and security hassles.
Control costsSpread your investment over time and simplify your cost management.

Another great adventure for the Turtle started today!

Rencontrer un client, une expérience enrichissante!

dominic danis — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:48:18 +0000

Ma présence au kiosque d’Urban Turtle à la conférence Agile à Salt Lake City me permet de rencontrer plusieurs clients existants et potentiels. Aujourd’hui, j’ai eu la chance de rencontrer un de nos clients actuels et d’avoir une bonne discussion avec lui.

Sa demande était : “Est-il possible d’afficher un champ dans Urban Turtle pour vérifier l’écart entre les estimations en heures sur les tâches et le temps vraiment passé sur ces mêmes tâches?” Il est effectivement possible de configurer Urban Turtle pour afficher cette information, mais je lui ai plutôt suggéré autre chose.

Investir de l’énergie à suivre des métriques semblables n’est pas la bonne chose à faire, selon moi. Ce qui est le plus important pour le PO c’est que l’équipe livre de la valeur à chaque itération, et non d’être des devins et de connaître le nombre d’heures nécessaires pour effectuer une tâche avant même d’avoir commencé à y travailler.

Je lui ai ensuite demandé ce qui était le vrai problème derrière cette demande. Il m’a répondu : “Nous ne sommes pas en mesure de respecter notre engagement itération après itération.” Voilà le vrai problème!

Je lui ai suggéré de travailler sur l’engagement de son équipe plutôt que sur des estimations.

Trouver un objectif attrayant pour votre équipe pour cette itération.
Réussir à créer des scénarios utilisateurs (user stories) qui livrent de la valeur et qu’il est possible de développer en une seule itération.
Ensuite, l’équipe doit apprendre à s’engager sur ce qu’elle peut faire, et non pas sur ce qu’elle espère être capable de faire. Il n’est pas utile de s’engager sur 20 points, ce qui est utile est de réfléchir à combien de valeur nous pouvons livrer au cours d’une itération! Notre vélocité nous aide à valider notre engagement, pas à le prendre. Ainsi, l’équipe sait mieux que tout le monde ce qu’elle sera en mesure de faire au cours des 2 prochaines semaines.
L’équipe doit aussi apprendre à tenir sa parole! Elle a le pouvoir de décider ce qu’elle fera au cours de la prochaine itération. On lui donne les outils pour y arriver, elle doit maintenant le faire. Ce qu’il faut réussir à faire avec l’équipe c’est de lui donner le pouvoir de livrer de la valeur. Commencer à vérifier si elle a mis 2 heures de plus que ce qui était prévu c’est briser la confiance qui lui permet de respecter ses engagements.

L’important dans un projet de développement logiciel c’est de travailler sur les vrais problèmes en utilisant les fondements de Scrum. L’outil doit être un support à la démarche et non un moyen de contrôle utilisé dans un contexte traditionnel.

Des discussions comme celles-là me rappellent pourquoi nous restons debout dans notre kiosque à tous les jours pendant une semaine!

Échanger avec un client c’est toujours un moment très enrichissant!

Urban Turtle proud to be at DevTeach

dominic danis — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 15:30:27 +0000

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!

Long ride for the Turtle to the ALM Summit

dominic danis — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 18:10:27 +0000

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.

Turtle in the cloud – episode 2

dominic danis — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:00:35 +0000

The Turtle is literally in the sky. Follow our team with Flight Stats

Software development according to Pyxis

dominic danis — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 19:03:13 +0000

Urban Turtle is a brand developed by Pyxis Technologies. For our 10th anniversary, we decided to produce some funny videos to demonstrate how we do things at Pyxis. You’ll see that everyone is equally respected, regardless of roles and responsibilities. We think of software development as an art, unleashing craftsmanship in a fun, lighthearted atmosphere. Life’s good for everyone involved at Pyxis. Members of the team had a great time filming these videos. Try to find Dom, our product owner, dressed in medieval gear or Luc, developer on the team, literally hacking away at his keyboard. We are also really proud of the brand new web site that we just launched. You’ll see that the individuals that make up the Pyxis team are really at the foreground here. We invite you to meet all members of Team Urban Turtle. We’re having a great time developing this product and we hope you also have a great experience using it!

RELEASE 3.4 – 5 Releases in 5 Months

dominic danis — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 11:02:01 +0000

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?

Where is the turtle heading?

dominic danis — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:25:25 +0000

Now that the vacations are over and that the 2010 Agile conference has come and gone, Team Urban Turtle is back to work, cooking up another promising release 3.4. With the release of the Scrum template from Microsoft came a Removed state, making it necessary to propose a recycle bin feature to our users. The next version of Urban Turtle will therefore include a recycle bin icon at the top of the iterations and areas panel. Users will be able to drag and drop items onto it to set the state of selected items to a configured deleted state. It will also be possible to view deleted work items by clicking on the icon. The team is also working on a select / unselect all option to flag or unflag all iterations and areas as favorites in one click. We have several more interesting features in our backlog, some of them coming from customers who voiced their opinions and proposed suggestions on our community-powered support site. Thank you all for your support and keep those suggestions coming! } Dom

Urban Turtle travels to Agile 2010 Orlando … Stick-it Contest Kick-Off

dominic danis — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 20:04:10 +0000

The Urban Turtle is at Agile 2010 with its fourth release in four months since the Visual Studio 2010 release in April. During the opening night, the turtle spent some time flying! We are also kicking off a fun contest to win an Xbox with the Kinect module. If you are in Orlando, come by the booth to get a sticker, stick it on an unusual place and upload it to the contest page. If you are not in Orlando you can also participate. Download a sticker here. Do not hesitate to vote for the photo you prefer at Urban Turtle fan page.

Create kick-ass software fast

dominic danis — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 22:38:40 +0000

One of the main orientations is to build Urban Turtle into TFS (as opposed to integrate with). All our design decisions are made to bring as much value-added as possible while creating a seamless experience for existing TFS users and grow with TFS as Microsoft adds new features. If you are interested about the details of the three releases we have made since the Visual Studio 2010 launch in April, please read the following posts:

April 30th – Urban Turtle 3.0 RTM is now available!
June 4th – Urban Turtle 3.1 now available!
July 8th – Urban Turtle 3.2 now available! – Support Visual Studio Scrum 1.0

We believe this orientation is what allows us to have a product that installs on the server in less than two minutes and gets a team to use it right away. We are very interested in hearing your stories and get your feedback about how we can further improve the experience. Help us make our Urban Turtle a Chameleon Also, our tight integration in the Web Access user interface makes the user feel at home and perceive TFS with new capabilities (as opposed to using an extra product). This is a big plus to have a smooth user adoption. We know that adopting scrum is already an interesting challenge; you do not need tools to get in your way but be a possible accelerator. Again, give Urban Turtle a try and let us know how we succeeded in turning it into a Chameleon.