Category : Urban Turtle

Two weeks ago, Urban Turtle announced its brand new partnership program. The partners are a select group of consulting firms who mastered the ins and outs of Scrum and are friends of the “Turtle”.

To provide more details on each of our partners, I follow the series of blog posts with the firm Readify.

Founded in 1999, Readify has established itself as certified experts on the .NET Application Development Platform within Australia.  They have office in Melbourne and Sydney and provide expertise around system architecture, application lifecycle management and user experience design using the latest Microsoft platform technologies.

In 2009 Readify introduced its projects offering known as DevPods. DevPods are based on a team-orientated project delivery capability which combines a high performance development team using an agile methodology (specifically Scrum) and focuses on close customer involvement to successfully deliver projects.

Readify is one of Australia’s young and savvy IT business success stories. This year they received the Australia’s 2010 ‘Best Places to Work’ award.

Mitch Denny, Chief Technology Officer at Readify explains why they appreciate Urban Turtle:

“If you plan to use Scrum with TFS, we recommend Urban Turtle instead of Excel-based planning workbooks”

You can learn about their offerings relating to Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) here. Do not hesitate to consult their website.

Aujourd ***, l’équipe Urban Turtle est fière de proposer une nouvelle version de son outil de gestion agile avec Team Foundation Server.

Cette dernière version propose aux équipes travaillant avec le dernier modèle de processus Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 un graphique d’avancement temps réel (donc pas de warehouse, d’analysis services etc…).

La dernière version est téléchargeable à l’endroit habituel : Download URBAN TURTLE

Urban Turtle is pleased to announce it is partnering with a select group of training organizations offering the Professional Scrum Developer (PSD) program. These organizations are Accentient, Pluralsight, Pyxis and SSW. Partnership involves a credit promotion for Urban Turtle and visibility of partner’s classes.

Professional Scrum Developer courses teach students how to turn product requirements into potentially shippable increments of software. Scrum traditionally avoids providing guidance for engineering practices. This course fills that void by addressing what developers do with the remaining 7 hours and 45 minutes of their day after the daily Scrum meeting. Classes are exercise-driven, where students work in teams and develop “done” increments from product backlog items. Each class is five days long, and classes can be either public or private.

All Professional Scrum Developer courses cover three main topics:

1. Scrum. PSD courses cover Scrum Fundamentals like Scrum roles, artifacts, and timeboxes. The course simulates being part of a Scrum team to expose students to these concepts in action. Students learn how to work as part of a Scrum team, which requires them to understand techniques for self-organization. At the end of the course students develop skills in identifying and eliminate typical types of Scrum team dysfunction.
2. Tools. PSD courses teach students how to leverage different development tools to employ Scrum practices. PSD .NET courses are taught in the context of Visual Studio 2010 using the Microsoft Scrum process template and add-ins such as Urban Turtle. Students learn how to map specific tool features and functions to the general Scrum practices they must use to be effective team members.
3. Practices. PSD courses cover all of the technical practices that team members need to successfully implement and ship functionality. These include coding practices like test-driven development, continuous integration, and refactoring; architecture practices such as emergent architecture and evolutionary database development; release management practices like planning, requirements definition, and deploying, and quality assurance practices from defining “done” to pair programming to version control to acceptance testing.

Aaron Skonnard, founder of Pluralsight explains why they joined this Urban Turtle initiative:

“Any initiatives that eases adoption of proven engineering practices with Microsoft technologies will always gain support from Pluralsight”

We asked Adam Cogan, Chief Architect for SSW and Microsoft Regional Director, who teaches the PSD .NET course all around the globe, what his thoughts on Urban Turtle were. He said:

“Mario one of the high value take-aways the students tell me they get, is seeing some of the great third party TFS tools in action. That’s why I ensure I demonstrate Urban Turtle, so they see Team Web Access providing awesome value, and it eases adoption of Scrum with the Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum process template”

Then we have Richard Hundhausen, Accentient’s president, who in cooperation with Microsoft and Ken schwaber, created the Professional Scrum Developer .NET training course says

“I has not yet met a certified PSD trainer who did not want to be listed as a friend of the Turtle”

When registering students for a PSD .NET course to get up to 100% off your Urban Turtle license cost, all you have to do is register for one of the training sessions listed here http://urbanturtle.com/?item=professional-scrum-developer. Make sure to mention your Urban Turtle license when registering. Your discount will be applied to your training fees. For more information on the curriculum of the Professional Scrum Developer program visit http://www.scrum.org/psd-net-syllabus/

Prise sur l’autoroute de la livraison, à la poursuite d’un modèle de processus qui venait de sortir. La tortue est désormais recherchée. Elle risque des années de travaux d’intérêts généraux, notamment dans le rôle d’accélératrice de solution pour les projets Scrum avec Team Foundation Server.

Source : Urban Turtle delivers a kick-ass experience for Scrum in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

Pour télécharger la version compatible avec le tout chaud modèle de processus Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum : Urban Turtle

In Urban Turtle’s Next Destination we listed the features that the team intended to produce for the first sprint of the release scheduled for June 2nd. I am as very happy product owner because the team delivered everything that was intended for the sprint and we have more killer features in the next and final sprint of this release.

The main feature is the integration of areas in the planning board. We were not pleased with the way we had develop this feature in our TFS 2008 version. We think we have a better design that will please all users. We are eager to release it on June 2nd to have your feedback.

As always, feedback is greatly appreciated as comments here or on the forum.

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!

Last week we were in Las Vegas at devconnections for the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and to present the new version of Urban Turtle. We often got the following questions :

1. Do we need to install anything on the workstations?
2. What happens if I customize the process template to fit the specific needs of my organization?
3. Does UrbanTurtle interfere with other tools from Microsoft, other vendors or that we could have developed?
4. What are your plans?
5. What is your pricing?

Do we need to install anything on the workstations?

From the beginning, our goal is that Urban Turtle users do not feel as if hey are using another product. We want to increase their comfort and simply extend their usage of Team Foundation Server (TFS). To achieve this, we did several things. The main one is that the user interface seamlessly blends in with Web Access of TFS. Therefore, there is just a one-time installation process on the server.

Furthermore when we developed the new installation process for the VS 2010 compatible version, Dominic’s (the Product Owner) condition of satisfaction was that the installation takes less than 5 minutes. The team over delivered because most of the time, the installation takes less than 2 minutes. If your installation takes longer, please let us know.

What happens if I customize the process template to fit the specific needs of my organization?

We know by experience that a lot of organization will want to use a standard process template and customize it by adding some fields to some work items or slightly customize some workflows or … In other words, there is no one way of doing Agile and Scrum. Therefore we designed Urban Turtle to let you take advantage of TFS’s customization capabilities; Urban Turtle is designed to be process template independent. It only needs to know a couple of things about your process template. This information needs to be put in a simple XML file. We will shortly write a blog entry that will explain how to easily create the mapping file. In the meantime, do not hesitate to ask questions on the forum

Does UrbanTurtle interfere with other tools from Microsoft, other vendors or that we could have developed?

No, Urban Turtle does not interfere with any tool.

Again our goal in designing Urban Turtle is that it seamlessly inserts itself in the TFS ecosystem. To achieve this, we decided to rely on standard extension mechanism and not have a separate data store. Urban Turtle directly manipulates work items using the standard APIs.

This allows us for example to validate the workflow transitions in the task board even if you customize your workflows. Also, since you customize your work item fields using standard mechanism and Urban Turtle does not add extra data, the powerful reporting and data warehousing capabilities of TFS will not be affected and will work as documented by Microsoft.

What are your plans?

The team is currently in the last sprint to release version 3.0. The product, the development environment and the team are now in a mature enough state to do solid public releases every 4 to 6 weeks. We will publish a blog every sprint to announce what we are working on.

What is your pricing?

I hope this answers the most common questions. If I missed some, do not hesitate to ask.

Do not hesitate to turtle your TFS, you are less than 5 minutes away!

~francois