Archive for category agile

TargetProcess 2009 Retrospective

Posted by Olga Kouzina in agile, developing on January 12th, 2010

Now, as we’re working full throttle on the new TargetProcess release, it’s probably high time to look back and make a retrospective of what we did back in the year 2009.

January 2009 was all about creating new burn down charts. TargetProcess 2.12 came with long anticipated support of tracking scope creep in releases and iterations:

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The other major improvement in 2.12 release was inner lists and inline edit in custom reports. The complete listing of TargetProcess features and improvements for 2.12 release is here.

Next goes TargetProcess 2.13. This release was solely devoted to Help Desk. We needed to improve support and communications with our customers, and we provided the new Help Desk functionality: issues queue, solutions, improved comments list and improved email integration. Due to these improvements, our customers have been able to provide better support to their customers.

If the time span between 2.12 and 2.13 was relatively short, it took us about 4 months to release TargetProcess 2.14. Along with a number of smaller improvements, we’ve implemented the major feature for setting up custom relations between entities in TargetProcess — custom fields. See how you can use custom fields to set up dependencies between user stories.

The summer of 2009 was all Kanban. We liked Kanban as a tool for our own work, so we focused on implementing Kanban board in TargetProcess. We’ve  written a series of blog posts on Kanban along the way, and we were about the first agile project management company to implement support for Kanban process. TargetProcess was Gold Sponsor at Agile 2009 in Chicago and we proudly presented Kanban board to conference participants:

kanban-board-resized

TargetProcess fall 2009 release included features for extended Kanban support and Team Foundation server integration. Curiously, whereas Kanban support and HelpDesk improvements have been implemented mostly for our own needs, Team Foundation Server plug-in has been requested by the customers. It boiled down in our backlog for about a year and a half, more and more requesters voted for TFS integration, until we implemented it. This only shows that prioritization is the hardest of  Product Owner jobs :) When it goes about priorities, putting emphasis on Kanban in 2009 seems to have been the right decision after all.

The final 2009 release, TargetProcess 2.17,  brought along Eclipse/Mylyn connector, improved prioritization and improved test cases management. Just like TFS integration, Eclipse integration has been requested by our customers, while prioritization and test cases management has been improved based on our own experience.

prioritize_resized

The bottomline is: in 2009 we’ve been trying to keep the balance between implementing customer requests and following product vision, to keep the integrity and main focus of TargetProcess as an agile project management tool. In 2010, we’re set to new goals — TargetProcess 3.0 is coming…

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TargetProcess ‘Kanbanized’

Posted by Michael Dubakov in agile, release on July 31st, 2009

Yesterday we’ve released TargetProcess v.2.15 with basic Lean / Kanban support. It includes customizable Kanban Board and Cumulative Flow Diagram. It is just a first release to provide the most important functionality.

We at TargetProcess moved away from iterations to flow. As a result, most important features like iteration planning, burn down charts, daily progress, etc. became useless to us. This situation was quite strange. We were developing agile project management software, but it lacked functionality that we needed.

We’ve tried to find viable workarounds. For example, we’ve created endless release (to emulate Planned state) and endless iteration (to emulate In Progress state). It worked, but visualization was just not there, thus violating Kanban principle. Finally we decided to implement required functionality and did it in 1 month.

New Knaban Board is fantastic. It visualizes user stories and bugs flows nicely, highlights limits, shows priorities, etc.

Kanban Board

Kanban Board

Next v.2.16 release will include options to switch off Iterations (if you don’t use them, they will not affect user interface), view release burn chart down by weeks, view other progress reports by release. And of course we are going to improve Kanban Board based on your feedback!

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TargetProcess Announced v.2.14 Release With Full Waterfall Support

Posted by Michael Dubakov in agile, release on April 1st, 2009

We are extremely happy to announce the full Waterfall support in TargetProcess. No wonder it has the reputation of being the most flexible agile project management software on the market! New v.2.14 (special edition) will include features like:

Gantt Charts On All Levels

You will at least see nice and accurate Gantt charts in project, release and even iteration scope. Now you may define and manage Critical Path painlessly. Do you know your real iteration end date? With Critical Path you can predict it with 105% probability with minimal effort.

Extensive Dependencies Management

Dependencies management on tasks level is a really complex thing for any project. Now with TargetProcess you may pretty easy define all dependent tasks. Why stop there? TargetProcess is smart enough to generate potentially dependent tasks for you.

Add task in waterfall process

Waterfall Life-cycle Process Support

As you already know, TargetProcess has unique concept of Process. You may tune it to support your development process. Now it is possible with Waterfall as well! You may define all important project phases like Requirements, Design, Implementation, Verification, Maintenance.

Also you may enable such valuable practices as Big Design Up Front, Requirements Freeze and Fixed Budget. User interface adopted for the current project phase. For example, during Implementation phase you can’t add defects and run test cases. During Requirements phase you can’t commit code into repository. This forces development team to strictly follow Waterfall process which is definitely the very right road to the project success.

Micro-management Support

Micro-management is a very important thing in software development projects. You just can’t spent time procrastinating or learning new technologies. Developers should focus on code only, every minute is important! Software development is hard and complex adaptive system in its core; you should do your best to complete project on time and under budget.

Now with TargetProcess you may estimate tasks down to minutes! That powers another extremely valuable metric – individual velocity. You can control everything and that is just great!

TargetProcess development teams hopes you’ll enjoy new innovative functionality that we are providing with this special Waterfall-edition release. Please leave your comments!

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Agile Project Management Tools Evaluations

Posted by Michael Dubakov in agile on August 26th, 2008

Short comparison of several agile project management tools. I can’t resist to provide the quote :)

Even though it is [TargetProcess] a massive application somehow it feels very intuitive. Reports are easily customizable, processes can be changed to fit your style such as XP or SCRUM. You can comprehensively organize your stories into iterations by dragging and dropping. In-place editing almost everywhere allows for super quick updates. Overall the app seemed extremely configurable yet uncluttered. Also available is a public API, support for Subversion integration and a rich story card board that seems easier to use than Mingle’s.

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Task Board Usage for Iteration Progress Tracking (Shots)

Posted by Michael Dubakov in agile, iteration, task board on November 28th, 2007

Here are shots of Task Boards for previous and current iterations. Nothing special with these boards: user stories on the left, tasks as stick notes, tasks statuses columns. Each developer has own color and this gives more personal visibility.

Iteration #12.3

Iteration #12.4

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Email Integration in Agile Project Management Tool

Posted by Michael Dubakov in agile on June 14th, 2007

How are you using email at work? Right, you communicate with customers, colleagues, managers, etc. And if you are a project/product manager you communicate about projects most the time. How are you using TargetProcess or any other APM Tool? Right, to plan and track progress. Communication affects plans greatly. It affects iteration/release scope, requirements effort, priorities and many other things.

Now the idea is obvious: “There should be a way to have communication inside TargetProcess to see all related information immediately”. No, we don’t want to create our own communication channels or Chats or IM. But we can provide nicely integration with existing communication tools (voice is the hardest one, but still possible in the future :) I can imagine how you bind phone call or video record to user story named “As a user I want to create my kitchen design”. So far we aren’t looking for the complete solution, but just integrating emails with APM tool.

The typical usage patterns for email integration are:

  • Customer sends an email with feature, problem or idea; you want to create user story, feature, request or bug right from email.
  • You want to see all related information for specific feature. You often communicate via email, so it will be great to have all emails combined with related user story.

Email integration concept is very simple. You may receive all emails and have complete inbox inside TargetProcess. Then you may do any action with emails like bind email to user story, create user story from email, reply to email, etc.

The most exciting thing is automation. Agile Project Management tool may create user stories from emails and bind emails to user stories automatically. For example, if email subject contains user story name “Login page”, obviously it should be attached to the user story “Login page”. If email has subject “[User Story 345] Implementation thoughts” it should be attached to user story with ID 345.

However you may receive email with information about many user stories. This case is more complex and likely will require some manual handling.

Benefits

Benefits are just great. You will have complete trace of requirement discussions with all related information inside user story view. It will be easier to maintain Needs -> Requirements -> Implementation workflow which is a very, very important thing in software development and likely paramount for project success.

BTW, most CRM has an email integration and I can’t imagine how you can use CRM without it.

Email Integration in TargetProcess

Basic email integration will be released in TargetProcess v.2.5 (July). Automatic rules and other interesting stuff will follow in next release.

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Help Desk Module Development Started

Posted by Michael Dubakov in agile, help desk on May 17th, 2007

We’ve started Help Desk implementation this week. It will spread two iterations. In the first iteration we will implement core Help Desk functionality like Add Request, View Requests List, Manage Requestors and Email Integration (TargetProcess will automatically retrieve email and convert some emails to requests). The second iteration will include advanced functionality like Help Desk Portal and Solutions.

Some very agile artifacts below :)

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