Pyxis

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

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Incubators are looking for ways to differentiate themselves. The newly launched AngelPad (an incubator created by 7 ex-googlers), for instance, bets on recreating a google-like atmosphere to foster innovation.

A recent post from Mark Shuttleworth seems to show that some foundations also have interesting ideas when it comes to financing projects :

“The model of the Foundation is unusual: we identify interesting change agents, like Mark, who are articulating powerful ideas that seem like the offer a hint of the future, and we fund them to work on those for a year. We also offer them an investment multiplier: if they put their personal money into a project, we multiply that by 10x or more, up to a maximum amount. In short, find good people, back them when they put skin in the game.”

Now, I am wondering about something : could incubators be a model for managing companies ?

• What would happen if you created a company that was merely a kind of aggregate of smaller companies sharing a common vision but running mostly independantly ?
• Could the Politics of Switzerland be an inspiration  for creating such an ecosystem ?
• How much federal government do you need to have inside a company to have the perfect balance between “feeling like a single company” and “feeling empowered enough to do things without any bureaucracy” ? (do-ers hate bureaucracy, so if you want doers in your company, you’d better find a way to systematically fight it if you want to keep these people)
• Is is possible for people to feel part of their community without neglecting the rest of the ecosystem, the same way Texas inhabitants feel both texan and american ?  (Have you noticed that people have both the texan flag and the american one in their garden over there ?)

There will be an interesting conference on Lean Startup by Eric Ries at SXSW. Eric asks 5 questions everyone involved in building new products (or any market offerings) should ask frequently. Answering these questions is not as easy or obvious as it sounds. It’s even more important for mobile development as product lifecycles are very short and spending too much effort on a bad or average product might have high impacts (opportunity loss). I’ll reuse these questions in coming blogs and apply them specifically to the mobile market. To read these questions and vote for Eric panel, visits http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/8270

Scrum est un outil de visibilité. On ne le dira jamais assez. Et sans doute faut-il trouver des formulations alternatives pour pouvoir être compris par des gens différents, avec des cultures et des expériences qui modifient la façon dont ils interprètent cette phrase. Et parfois, un dessin suffit, un graphique suffit.

Aujourd’hui j’ai passé une bonne heure avec un gestionnaire de projet traditionnel qui souhaitait savoir comment faire un suivi budgétaire “avec Scrum”, selon sa formulation. Nous nous concentrons donc sur cette idée de “suivi budgétaire”. Une chance pour moi, il est très ouvert et me dit simplement “comment fais-tu toi ?”. Magnifique non ?

Simple : la clef dans son cas c’est la définition de Done. En effet, nous plaçons un curseur dans la définition de Done. Ce curseur sépare ce que livre l’équipe à chaque itération et le reste des activités qu’il faudra faire pour avoir un Working Software, soit un logiciel en production utilisé par quelqu’un.

D’un seul coup, la définition de Done devient un outil concret pour lui. Voici ci-dessous une version simplifiée de ce à quoi nous sommes arrivés. Il lui apparaît très naturellement que les activités concrètes de mise en production sont liées au Done et que le voir exprimé ainsi lui fait réaliser tous les éléments que l’ensemble de l’équipe avait jusque là oublié.

Combinés aux Release burndown chart et au Value burnup chart, ce budget plan complète la vision 360° qu’il a du nouveau jeu dans lequel il joue.

Selon les prévisions que vous ferrez, vous pourrez utilisez ces graphiques pour amener une discussion autour de la vision partagée que vous avez des prochaines itérations. Par exemple aujourd’hui, les graphiques étaient sensiblement semblables à ceux-ci et la réflexion principale de mon interlocuteur a été de dire que le budget serait consommé avant que la courbe de valeur ait commencée à s’infléchir, ce qui lui a donné envie de trouver plus de budget.

Attention néanmoins à ce que l’on fait dire aux chiffres. Même dans ce cas d’un petit nombre d’itération, la courbe de valeur qui ne décroit pas pourrait nous mettre la puce à l’oreille et nous parler de la piètre qualité des estimations de valeur. Il se pourrait que l’on ait affaire à des priorités et non à des estimations relatives de valeur ajoutée. Mais ceci est une autre histoire

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.

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See Enough is enough: disinfecting OSM from poisonous people.

“I used to write the code, own the domain names, run the mailing list(s), run the servers, evangelize, talk to the press and so on. I’ve successively and successfully given up those rights to very capable individuals. However this has led to a power vacuum when it comes to making some key decisions because nobody, for example and in a sense, is “in charge” of everything. For the most part I’ve enjoyed giving up control and seeing the project blossom, because it wouldn’t have if I hadn’t.”

There will be no rest for our team during the hottest months of the year. Today, we launch Urban Turtle 3.3. This new version includes an hour burndown chart along with some ergonomics, navigation and performance enhancements.

Real-time Hour Burndown Chart. Now with TFS Basic!

Will we be able to respect our engagement? Every Agile team wants to answer this question fast and with certainty. To answer this question, there is no better tool than an hour burndown chart. Based on remaining hours of work in the sprint, the most accurate type of burndown chart is now available in Urban Turtle for your Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 projects.

Click the “Burndown” button, Urban Turtle reads the sprint Start Date and End Date from the Sprint work item type (which you can easily create with Urban Turtle) and shows you a chart based on real time data. In other words, our report is based on the work item repository and does not need the TFS warehouse and Reporting Services to be installed and configured. This feature is therefore available on every instance of Team Foundation Server 2010, including TFS Basic.

New Feature: Work Item Types Filter

The planning board now displays a button bar that allows users to filter the cards displayed.  Different views for different roles; your Product owner could now focus on the Product Backlog Items, your Scrum Master on impediments and the team… on Tasks. Each work item type used and configured in your project can be selected and this feature is available for all process templates.

New Feature: Persistent Settings
Urban Turtle can now retrieve the last iteration and area that you were previously working on. No need to re-click the same old links before the daily anymore. Just sign in and Urban Turtle displays your favorite view of the backlog.

We recommend that everyone upgrades to this latest version and we are eagerly awaiting your feedback. Let us know what you think on our community-powered support site!

If you attend the Agile 2010 conference, do not miss the chance to see a demo in person of these cool features. Come meet members of the Urban Turtle team at booth 128.

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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:

1. April 30th – Urban Turtle 3.0 RTM is now available!
2. June 4th – Urban Turtle 3.1 now available!
3. 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.

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Team Urban Turtle is again proud to announce a new release: Urban Turtle 3.2. This new version features support for the Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 process template from Microsoft, along with filtering of iterations and areas.

Support for Visual Studio Scrum 1.0
Urban Turtle 3.2 fully supports the new Scrum template from Microsoft from the get-go. This post introduces the new features that have been developed for the template, but I strongly recommend that you take some time to read this previous entry to understand the reasoning behind them. Most of these features can be configured to work with other process templates.

New Feature: Approval
Product Owners can now approve PBIs with a single click when looking at their backlog in the Planning Board.

New Feature: Commitment
We made it possible to commit to PBIs contained in a sprint with a single click, again from the Planning Board.

New Feature: Sprint Details
We’ve made it easy to create and access the Sprint work item through the Sprint Details button in the planning board’s iteration list.

New Feature: Favorite iterations and areas
As Dom mentionned before, we have been looking at ways to reduce the number of iterations and areas visible at any time. We’ve come up with a great idea which actually is not our idea at all. I mean, favorites is anything but new in software! Basically, you can now easily switch between viewing all iterations/areas where you can flag some of them as favorites, and then hop back to a view where only favorite iterations/areas are displayed. This effectively reduces the number of work items displayed at once and helps you focus on the task at hand.

Once again, we recommend that everyone upgrades to this latest version and we are eagerly awaiting your feedback. Let us know what you think in our community-powered support site!

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Minyaa is the successor of Kaamelot plugin, initially developped for JIRA 3.7 and maintained until JIRA 3.12.

When Minyaa started to replace Kaamelot, there were more than 120 modules in atlassian-plugin.xml file.

Kaamelot (now Minyaa) comes with improvements for different features in JIRA and many i18n properties.

Following Atlassian documentation, the way to define i18n properties is as follows :

<atlassian-plugin key="jira.plugin.minyaa.core" name="Minyaa JIRA Plugin Core" pluginsVersion="1">
  <module key="ModuleKey" name="ModuleName" ...>
      <resource type="i18n" name="i18n" location="com.myplugin.jira.MyClass" />
   </module>
   <module key="OtherModuleKey" name="OtherModuleName" ...>
      <resource type="i18n" name="i18n" location="com.myplugin.jira.MySecondClass" />
   </module>
</atlassian-plugin>

For some modules, the I18n resources were declared using 2 files, in order to reuse existing i18n resource files without having to duplicate translations.

<atlassian-plugin key="jira.plugin.minyaa.core" name="Minyaa JIRA Plugin Core" pluginsVersion="1">
<module key="ModuleKey" name="ModuleName" ...>
...
<resource type="i18n" name="i18n" location="com.myplugin.jira.MyClass" />
<resource type="i18n" name="i18n.Other" location="com.myplugin.jira.MyOtherClass" />
...
</module>
...
</atlassian-plugin>

Without more detailed documentation, when Kaamelot (Minyaa) required to extend existing i18n properties, the technic used was to append a new I18n Location in the extended WebWork Action, by accessing I18nBean object.
You can imagine that with 120 modules (components, webwork actions, Report, Portlet, Service, Issue Tab Panel, Project Tab Panel, …), extending i18n properties may be a pleasure …

With JIRA 4.0, the Gadgets arrived with new constraints … Minyaa portlets have been migrated into real Gadget (Atlassian Framework 2) only for JIRA 4.1.x.

As Minyaa performs many extensions in JIRA components, it was not possible to migrate Minyaa plugins in OSGi Plugin. Only Portlets have been migrated into Gadget in separate Plugin (jira-plugin-minyaa-xxx-gadgets-4.x.x-x.x.jar).

Gadgets, as any graphical item, require I18n Properties ! How does it work ?

Following Atlassian documentation, it only requires to declare in gadget xml file the supportedLocales macro with a key filter for I18n key. A new component (the I18nResolver) is able to load all I18n resources of all plugins and extend the Gadget definition using the key filter.

Ok, lets go ! For Minyaa Core, my first portlet to migrate was Minyaa Fragment Portlet …

• The Minyaa Core Gadget plugin (jira.plugin.minyaa.core.gadget) is created.

• The declaration is done as follows :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<Module>
<ModulePrefs ...>
#supportedLocales("gadget.common,portlet.fragments")
</ModulePrefs>
...
</Module>

• All needed i18n resources definitions are provided by the plugin identified jira.plugin.minyaa.core

Oups … Some of i18n key were not translated!

After many search in documentation, I have connected the debugger in order to understand where the issue was …

Root cause :

The I18nResolver performs a scan of all i18n resources provided by different plugins, and jira.plugin.minyaa.core i18n resources are found and loaded!
Yes, but they are loaded in a Container based on HashMap and using the couple pluginKey + i18nName, as a key.

It means that jira.plugin.minyaa.core i18n resources are loaded using jira.plugin.minyaa.core as pluginKey, and each i18n Resources Name.
Since Minyaa Core plugin contains more than 1 module the i18n Resources were not unique.

Before the migration, the atlassian-plugin.xml modules were declared as follows :

<atlassian-plugin key="jira.plugin.minyaa.core" name="Minyaa JIRA Plugin Core" pluginsVersion="1">
<module key="ModuleKey" name="ModuleName" ...>
...
<resource type="i18n" name="i18n" location="com.myplugin.jira.MyClass" />
<resource type="i18n" name="i18nOther" location="com.myplugin.jira.MyOtherClass" />
...
</module>
<module key="OtherModuleKey" name="OtherModuleName" ...>
...
<resource type="i18n" name="i18n" location="com.myplugin.jira.MySecondClass" />
...
</module>
...
</atlassian-plugin>

Since the migration, each i18n resource has to be unique (per i18n resource file) as follows :

<atlassian-plugin key="jira.plugin.minyaa.core" name="Minyaa JIRA Plugin Core" pluginsVersion="1">
<module key="ModuleKey" name="ModuleName" ...>
...
<resource type="i18n" name="i18n" location="com.myplugin.jira.MyClass" />
<resource type="i18n" name="i18nOther" location="com.myplugin.jira.MyOtherClass" />
...
</module>
<module key="OtherModuleKey" name="OtherModuleName" ...>
...
<resource type="i18n" name="i18nSecond" location="com.myplugin.jira.MySecondClass" />
...
</module>
...
</atlassian-plugin>

I18n translation is important for all plugins, but you need to be aware that for large and old plugins, this is not a small work !