Current development status @ TargetProcess. Important things are highlighted:
Jan 062012
May 122011
See user stories prioritization and road-mapping for Subversion Integration Plugin:
Apr 072011
Here are 10 recent feedbacks about how our support worked for people:
- Your team is great
- Spoke english well, was an actual human being, told me the exact answer i was looking for
- Didn’t sell but helped me with a adoption question. Gave sound advise. I’ll be back with a request for a bunch of lic in the future.
- Quick help and response
- Immediate response to question
- Helpful as always
- It takes too much time to figurate out the problem and how to fix it
- Anthony answered all my questions and directed me to the correct parts of TargetProcess.
- Excellent help
- As always, getting the best support from your people
These comments are taken without any filtering, just 10 recent.
Nov 052010
We’ve dropped product Roadmap silently and it was not a good idea. I want to share the reasons behind this decision as well as our plans for the next several months.
Roadmap Problems
Roadmap has been publicly available over the past several years on our web site. We’d change it time and again and we’d promise something based on the roadmap, but then do not keep the promise. Some examples are Wiki integration and Help Desk Portal re-design. Wiki integration has lived in the roadmap from the beginning, but it is still an idea in the backlog. Some activities have been started on Help Desk Portal, but paused this Summer to focus on other things.
In a nutshell, roadmap was harmful to all parties. Customers relied on it and were disappointed if priorities had to be changed. We we were not able to stick to the priorities due to various internal and external reasons.
Now we have a single goal:
Create a life-changing agile project management tool for small to medium businesses
It means we want to create the best APM tool in the world for small to medium businesses. This is a very challenging goal, but we are really passionate about it and we know how to achieve it.
The short term strategy is very fluid though. There are SO many parts in TargetProcess we want to improve and make them simple, emotional, fast and useful. We know how to do that. The only problem is that we can’t focus on all parts at the same time, we have to prioritize carefully and pick 2-3 top things.
Currently, we think that the most important problems to address are:
- Performance
- Multiple teams support
Performance
Our ultimate goal is a sub-second response time for all pages on any reasonable load. Many areas in TargetProcess should be improved to make it happen. Currently we are focusing on a new plugins architecture that will significantly reduce server load. The other thing we’ve started is the complete redesign of View/Add/Edit pages. These pages are used most and ironically they are the slowest (even lists are faster).
We got rid of half-backed solutions this year and every major improvement is now preceded with the complete UX cycle incl. concepts brainstorming, prototyping, usability testing etc. Definitely, this slows us down at the start, but the final solutions will be outstanding in our opinion. For example, we are very happy with the navigation improvement this year. It still has some problems, but it was the first attempt to apply UX phase. The next solutions will be even better.
We’ve split into 2 teams that work on solutions almost independently with full focus. New plugins should be released on January and you will enjoy:
- Faster (much faster) performance
- Nice and easy-to-use API to create new plugins (currently it is quite hard to do)
- Mashups. It will be possible to inject UI on TargetProcess pages and create really powerful custom things
View/Add/Edit will be released in small batches and in the end you will have:
- Fast and painless navigation to Views everywhere
- Full inline edit in Views
- Quick Add everywhere
Multiple teams
Multiple teams support is very important for about ~50% of our customers. If you have several teams working on dependent projects, you will enjoy it as well. We believe no tools on the market support multiple teams planning and tracking nicely and expect to really simplify life of many people in agile software development soon.
The first part of the solution is UI to manage and track multiple teams. It is already defined and we are running usability tests to improve it. This UI (we call it ZoomBoard so far) will be included into TargetProcess as a beta this month (November) and you will be able to use it to plan and track several projects.
Then we are going to change business layer to support multiple teams. There is no clear estimate for that so far, but we expect to release it in 6 months. Multiple teams support will allow you to:
- Plan and track work on a team(s) level for several projects on one screen
- Plan and track releases and iterations on a team level, no matter how many projects the team works on
- Have complete visibility on an individual/person level
We know that there were just 2 major releases this year, but upcoming improvements will be outstanding in my personal and highly biased opinion. Only 2 customers participated in ZoomBoard usability tests so far, and here’s their feedback:
The new task board is a hammer! Definitely the best PM tool on the market
It will be a life-changing tool for agile project manager
I am sure you will like upcoming releases. These are significant steps toward our ultimate goal.
Best,
Michael Dubakov
TargetProcess founder and CEO
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.
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?
Today we updated TargetProcess Roadmap page.
Our roadmap is really worth looking at now since we’re working on some particularly exciting things – fully customizable navigation, improved TP Tray and multiple projects support.
Stay tuned and let us know what you think of those new navigation concepts!
We’ve got TargetProcess UX community for enthusiastic contributors:
Soon (in February) we will release a completely new Tp.Tray. It is a small windows-based application that helps you to capture screenshots and post bugs into TargetProcess really fast. In fact it will be a free screen capture utility with a nice interface and basic functionality.
There are many new features and improvements in Tp.Tray. It will be possible to capture several screenshots and store them in a library for future use.
Next, you’ll be able to merge several screenshots into one image and edit it as required. Editing is much more powerful and optimized for screenshots with annotations.
In the next releases we will extend Tp.Tray with some nice capabilities like:
- Instant notifications about events in TargetProcess
- Ability to add Features, Stories and Requests quickly
- My ToDo list
- Automatic time tracking
Stay tuned!
Long time no posts about ToDo area re-design, so back on track. In December we completed the dynamic prototype:
It was created in SketchFlow tool by Microsoft. Then we had the first formal usability tests on mere mortals (developers and testers from our company). 7 problems were found during usability testing (check usability test report (PDF, 900K) if you are curious).
Here is the conclusion from the usability test report:
This pilot testing of prototype by 5 people was extremely useful and enough to expose rather evident gaps and problem of implemented concept. After these issues are corrected, we will bravely start testing it with our customers.
However, from my point of view, this particular prototype has some disadvantages:
1. It’s very high level. From time to time during the testing we would say: ‘This is only a prototype, disregard this’, ‘Ooops , this doesn’t work, it’s prototype’. I guess we would have had different test results if we had a little bit more real proto. Our respondents would have been able to use different workarounds. But in this version of prototype they could perform only those actions which we had defined and covered by scripts related to scenarios. Anyway, they couldn’t look for a workaround and missed the new functionality because they had no choice.
2. Several of our respondents complained that actions are not marked out enough and are not easy to find at a glance.
— Nadia Bulynia
In general, we are happy with the results, but should find a better prototyping tool. It took too much effort to create the prototype using SketchFlow. Moreover, it is incomplete and has serious limitations mentioned above.
- Personas
- Scenarios
- Wireframes – part I (part II, part III)
- Prototype and Usability testing results
- Improved prototype
- New ToDo list in TargetProcess
Jan 122010
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:
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:
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.
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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