Olga Kouzina

What’s New: TargetProcess 2.19.6

Release Comments
May 112010

TargetProcess on-site and on-demand accounts have been updated to build 2.19.6.

Here’s what’s new in this build:

Features

—————–

#26373 Release Burndown Chart: simple mode

Now you can select which mode to use for burndown charts: simple or advanced.

burn

See more on simple vs. advanced mode  in TargetProcess burndown charts document.

#26702 View pages: count of entities in tabs

You can see count of embedded items  in an entity view:

count1

#26928 Integration with Visual Studio 2010 Plugin

Fixed Bugs

—————–

#26986 Scroll position should be preserved when filters in dashboard components are used

#26953 JS exception when adding UserStory

#26945 “Request type” column is missing in Requesters->Requests inner list

#26832 Custom Reports: Filter by tags using ‘contains’ condition should support asterisk

#26756 Quick Add Test Case window is not closed

#26619 Observers should be able to see attachments

Posted by Olga Kouzina at 3:19 pm Tagged with:

TargetProcess UX Concept Slides

Design, Process, Usability Comments
May 062010

Take a look at some presentations of upcoming UX concepts for some of TargetProcess features:

Teams progress presentation

Release planning

For more information on how are we moving along the UX path, see what we do in TargetProcess UX Group.

Posted by Olga Kouzina at 7:24 pm Tagged with: ,

Troubleshooting Tips: HelpDesk Setup

Howto Comments
May 052010

Sometimes people get errors with HelpDesk setup (for Windows authentication enabled). Most of these errors can be eliminated by some simple troubleshooting actions :

1. Check for the highlighted sections in Admin -> General Settings:

screen12. Check HelpDesk web.config (it’s  C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\HelpDesk\wwwroot\web.config by default):

screen-23. Check Virtual Folder for HelpDesk:

screen3

4. Check Virtual Folder for TargetProcess:

screen4

5. Check TargetProcess Application Pool:

screen5

6. Add your user to IIS_WPG group if after step 5  Application Pool is stopped:

screen6

7.  Check if Windows authorization is enabled for MS SQL Database, and if user is properly mapped with TargetProcess database.

See TargetProcess HelpDesk Installation Guide for more information.

Posted by Olga Kouzina at 9:00 pm Tagged with: ,

Support: Checklist for Performance Problems

Howto Comments
Apr 222010

If you experience some problems with TargetProcess performance on your server, don’t be in a hurry to blame it on the product. Most likely, these problems are related to hardware and software configuration on the server.

We’ve put up a page on TargetProcess web-site  with some tips  on how to speed-up investigation of performance issues:

http://targetprocess.com/support/faq/Performance_Problem.aspx

Posted by Olga Kouzina at 4:43 pm Tagged with: ,

TargetProcess Team To Attend Agile Central Europe Conference

Event Comments
Apr 052010

We will be attending Agile Central Europe Conference in Krakow, Poland,  on April 8-9th:

http://agilece.com/

TargetProcess is the Gold Sponsor of this event and we look forward to networking with agile folks. There will be 8 of us.  Michael Dubakov, TargetProcess Founder and CEO, is coming as well.

This is a 2-day gathering, but in a way, such a small conference with about 150 participants creates a closer and warmer environment compared to what it was at Agile 2009 in Chicago. We’ve also been the Gold sponsor for Agile Eastern Europe Conference in Kiev in September 2009 (11 people from TargetProcess attended Agile EE).  Such conferences work great for our team to get closer, have some fun and network with people.

Agile CE program includes some quite interesting keynotes and workshops, but most of all we look forward to open space jam.

See you at Agile CE in Krakow :)

Posted by Olga Kouzina at 7:29 pm Tagged with:

Kanban: Why 3 States in Cumulative Flow Diagram

Uncategorized Comments
Mar 222010

We have implemented cumulative flow diagram in TargetProcess v 2.15 as a tracking/reporting chart to get a quick overview of user stories in To Do, In Progress and Completed state:

cfd_default2

Why we have only 3 fixed states for cumulative flow diagram while all the states for User Stories and other entities are customizable? We could have enabled showing the count of User Stories in all the customized states, be it 6 or 7 or 8 states. But the visual diagram would have been too clogged this way. We would have had to either follow the reporting stats meticulously,  replicate all the states and counts in the digram and lose the visual UX of this chart, or to get it down to 3 basic  states such as ToDo, InProgress and Completed (all the customized states are just a variation for those 3 states, one way or another) and retain a good info-design.

Some people asked us to enable more detailed views in cumulative flow digram and we will consider implementing this in the future.

You’re welcome to submit your requests on cumulative flow diagram and other features to TargetProcess HelpDesk or to TargetProcess UX Group.

Posted by Olga Kouzina at 6:50 pm Tagged with: , , ,

Support Teamwork: Optimizing Flows

Process Comments
Mar 192010

We’re always working to improve teamwork of our Support and QA folks to better process  support requests (quick reminder:  you can submit your question/idea/request/ issue to TargetProcess HelpDesk or by email)

That’s  how we decided to optimize some flows and eliminate Muda:

1. Some  issues are related to performance. Support work starts with asking basically one and the same set of questions about their server configuration, CPU load, IIS version (see TargetProcess system requirements).  Sending questions and answers back and forth takes time (sometimes days).

The solution we’d use so far is  a documented form that our customers will be supposed to fill in as they encounter performance problems. Why document and not online form: it might take time to put together all the info about server configuration, and an online form can expire. In the future, we could write a utility to measure all the parameters for performance and generate an .xml file.

2. We’ve got a “Waiting for Response” state for the requests waiting on answers from customers. The rule is: if a customer says nothing after 2 days, we send a reminder. Then, if no response in another 2 days, we send a note that we’re closing this request. It takes time to sift through the requests with “Waiting for response” state, so we’d set up an automatic alert utility for that.  Sometimes people don’t see our emails with questions. Maybe their spam filters are blocking TP notifications.  But no emails – no support.  Dear customers, please, keep track of all the notifications and comments from our HelpDesk.

3. Sometimes there’re issues that are impossible to reproduce. Our QA  might spend hours with no success. All the info is in place, all the artifacts – but bugs wouldn’t show up.  For such cases, we’d ask our customers to capture videos and  attach video files to their requests.  If video does not help, then the next step would be to set up an online meeting with customers to find the causes of problems.

You’re welcome to share your opinion: which flows/small things can be improved in TargetProcess support?

Posted by Olga Kouzina at 10:29 pm Tagged with: ,

New: Active Role Highlight

Release Comments
Feb 242010

Some projects might have a complex workflow with many roles involved e.g. a User Story can have Developer, QA, Analyst, Verifier roles associated with it.  So you might want to know who’s currently working on a User Story as you look at USs  list, with no sideway clicks to other pages.

That’s why we implemented the active role highlight in TargetProcess 2.18.4:

active-role-highlight

Posted by Olga Kouzina at 7:00 pm Tagged with:

TargetProcess Specific “What is Where”

Howto Comments
Feb 192010

We did our best to provide the complete information about TargetProcess  on the web-site and in User Guides. Still,  judging by the questions people send in, there’s a need to write some sort of guide to our support documentation and videos.

Even if you’ve been working with TargetProcess for a while, we’d still recommend to look at this blog post on TargetProcess do-it-yourself training for some useful learning tips.

If you’re looking to get a demo of what TargetProcess does as an agile project management tool and decide if you need to sign-up for a trial, go to our Product page with all its sub-pages.  Note, that Download page includes plug-ins listed on the Integration page, as well as TP Tray and HelpDesk.

Free Edition, one of the sub-pages, is worth a special note. This is a sign-up page.  BUT one thing to remember is that even if it’s FREE edition, TargetProcess is fully functional and comes with all the updates for free as well. The only limitation of free edition is the amount of licenses which is 5.  So, there’s no need to sign-up for new free edition trials over and over again if you want an upgrade.  You’re entitled to fully functional TargetProcess software with all the upgrades and new releases for free, if you’ve got a team of 5. If by any chance you forgot your account name, or you’ve lost your installation file, or you haven’t had time to look at TargetProcess and want to resume the evaluation, just email us and we will send you all your account information. We keep it and it’s out job to provide it when needed.

Support is your main destination as an eager TargetProcess user :) . You  can post  ideas and requests to HelpDesk from there, read User Guides, watch videos, and contact our live chat. TargetProcess System Requirements are also there along with Microsoft Web Platform Installer required to run TargetProcess on-site edition.

On to User Guides. We’ve got .pdfs mostly, but TargetProcess User Guide comes online and is searchable. You can type in any term there and look at search results.

It might take us time to get back to you with personal answers, although we usually answer within 24 answers. But what if you need this answer right away? You might find it yourself with no waste wait time if you use those tips.

Enjoy working with TargetProcess :)

Posted by Olga Kouzina at 8:51 pm Tagged with: ,

New: Bug Pain Plugin – No Pains!

Plugins Comments
Feb 172010

We’ve got an interesting new tool in TargetProcess 2.18.1 — Bug Pain plugin. It emerged from our own “bug pains”  to empower decision making for QA team as they pull some bug to fix, with no Product Owner involved.

Disclaimer: QA Team are aware of product development strategy, they just needed some help with bugs prioritization when Product Owner is not available to talk.

Bug Pain value in TargetProcess depends on “Severity, “Visibility” and “Class” values as below:

bug-pain-severity-visibility

“Severity” indicates bug severity per se. This could be some grave error that ruins the whole release or a small UX flaw. We’ve got the following “Severity” values:

5 – Much anger & crying – No workaround
4 – Anger & swearing – Difficult workaround
3 – Annoyance & frustration – Easy workaround
2 – Confused
1 – Laugh if notice

“Visibility” indicates how many users are likely to spot bug and how soon. E.g. it takes 10 steps to reproduce bug (random not straightforward steps), in a browser used by 1% of people –  or this is an error on Login Page for 100% users as they attempt to login.  Our Visibility values are:

1 – ~5%
2 – <50%
3 – >50%
4 – ~100%

“Class” shows relevance of bug in the context of product development strategy.  This value can differ for each particular company/project/product.  Speaking of TargetProcess, improving usability is paramount for us at the moment.  So, a bug with usability related Class will be more important than a bug found by Trial User.  Here’re the Classes we’ve got:

1 – No customer, Security
2 – Free/Trial user, Cosmetic
3 – Paid Customer, Usability, Whoops

Bug Pain is calculated based on this formula:

[Bug Pain] = X * [Severity] + Y * [Visibility] + Z * [Class],

where X, Y, Z are specified in the plugin setup (8, 5 and 4 respectively).  These values have been identified experimentally based on common sense for a cloud of bugs and may vary for each particular company/project/product:

bug-pain-calculated-automatically

Next, bugs can be filtered by Bug Pain value.  The most important and urgent bugs will be on top of the list and should be fixed first:

pain

This plug-in is a helpful tool for Product Owners and QA Teams as they prioritize bug fixes.

Bug Pain plug-in comes out-of-the box with TargetProcess now.

Posted by Olga Kouzina at 12:14 pm Tagged with: , ,
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