Archive for category developing

Spoiler: What’s Cooking in TargetProcess Kitchen

Posted by Olga Kouzina in developing on February 9th, 2010

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:

http://groups.google.com/group/uxtargetprocess

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Upcoming Tp.Tray Release - Screen Capture Utility

Posted by Michael Dubakov in developing, plugin on February 2nd, 2010

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.

tp_tray_1

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.

tp_tray_2

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.

tp_tray_3

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!

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Re-designing ToDo Area: Prototype and Usability Testing

Posted by Michael Dubakov in UI, design, developing on January 18th, 2010

Long time no posts about ToDo area re-design, so back on track. In December we completed the dynamic prototype:

todo 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.

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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:

1-12-2010-4-34-37-pm-resized

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 Videos: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Add-In Video

Posted by Olga Kouzina in developing, howto, usability on November 19th, 2009

Check the new Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Add-in Video:

http://www.targetprocess.com/video/visualstudioaddin/visualstudioaddin.html

VS Add-In is a great time saver for .NET developers. All they want to have is ToDo list and painless time tracking. TargetProcess Visual Studio Add-In provides exactly that. You see ToDo list, may open assignments in browser if you need additional details and may close tasks right there. Time fragmentation report is an icing for self-improvement process. The report clearly shows how fragmented your time is.

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Re-designing ToDo Area: Wireframes III

Posted by Michael Dubakov in UI, design, developing, usability on November 3rd, 2009

In the end of last week we shared new ToDo list concepts with TargetProcess UX group members. We have some feedback already, but it is interesting to receive more.

So what do you think about these ToDo list concepts?

Concept 1 (Clickable PDF. You may click on links that has dashed border)
Concept 2 (Static PDF)

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Re-designing ToDo Area: Wireframes II

Posted by Michael Dubakov in UI, design, developing, usability on October 19th, 2009

Last Friday we discussed another ToDo list concept. The idea is to provide something similar to Kanban Board for personal tasks management, but more flexible.

Flexibility may be provided via custom grouping. For example, person may group tasks by user story vertically and by time frame horizontally and see something like on the wireframe below:

todo_kanban1

You may select another grouping, for example, by state, or by tag, or by custom field. As we see it will provide grate abilities to plan personal work with very creative patterns that we can’t even imagine. Maybe it is too complex, we are not sure so far. We’ll have usability testing phase on ready prototype to evaluate this solution.

Drag and drop may be used to plan personal work from backlog.

todo_kanban2

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Re-designing ToDo Area: Design Session

Posted by Michael Dubakov in UI, design, developing on October 13th, 2009

Today we’ve had the first design session of the new ToDo area. We’ve put together the list of items and actions and discussed potential ToDo layouts. It was boring initially, but the closer we moved to wireframes,  the hotter discussions :)

actions

plain

time

time2

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Re-designing ToDo List: Scenarios

Posted by Michael Dubakov in UI, design, developing, usability, v.3.0 on October 7th, 2009

Today we spent several hours writing scenarios for Mary (she is a Tester). There are two types of scenarios. The first describes a typical working day. The other set of scenarios describes concrete goals that Mary wants to accomplish with the help of TargetProcess.

Sorry for a lengthy post, but we want to provide all the important details and show how we are trying to re-design TargetProcess. If you think that this persona is artificial, let us know. If you think you know similar girl, let us know. If you have any questions, just ask. Here we go.

Mary, 26 yo, Functional Tester

laptop_mary
Has 3 years of experience in testing web applications. Knows how to write test cases, works  with several bug tracking systems. Hates bad UI and constantly tries to convince developers to fix ugly areas.

Environment

  • 30 people development team, single project, 6 testers in the team.
  • Scrum process with 2-week iterations.
  • Uses laptop at work

Activities

  • Find and submit bugs, capture screenshots
  • Create test cases
  • Verify user stories (execute test cases)
  • Verify fixed bugs
  • Communicate with developers about stories and bugs
  • Participate in daily meetings, iteration planning, release planning meetings

Behavior

  • Smokes and drinks coffee
  • Likes to communicate with people around
  • Listens to music at work
  • Argues with developers about found bugs
  • Uses IMs quite often to chat with friends
  • Likes bright colors

Goals

  • Have fun at work
  • Good communication and social environment at work, money not so important

Typical Day Scenario

Mary’s working day (Tuesday).

Mary comes to the office at 9 am. She has daily meeting at 10 am, so she makes herself some coffee and checks email (20 mins). She looks at what she worked on yesterday, what’s new came today and what are her assignments (10 min). She forgot to add time yesterday, so she adds time right now for all the yesterday’s activities. She loads Skype and says “Hi” to friends.

Then daily meeting begins (20 min).
- I verified the UI improvement bug, then verified user story “As a admin I want to un-delete projects” and added 3 bugs on this user story (one is critical and 2 UI improvements). Today I am going to discuss a new user story with Pete, check specs and start writing Test Cases. Also I can’t setup Ubuntu to check several UI bugs on FireFox for Linux, so I need help.
- (Larry) Mary, we have one blocking bug to reproduce. It is very important.
- OK, I’ll take a look at it.
- (Ted) I can help you with Linux
- Oh, cool! Let’s do it this afternoon.

Meeting is over. After the meeting Mary has the following priorities: the blocking bug, Linux setup and bugs check, discussing the new user story.

Mary has coffee, smokes with friends, thinks about the blocking bug and discusses possible reasons with developers. (15 min).

Pete comes to ask about a meeting on the new user story.
- Hey, let’s discuss the  new story I have.
- I have a blocking bug, so I can’t attend right now, maybe you’ll help me to reproduce it?
- OK, let’s take a look.

They investigate the bug for 30 mins and reproduce it successfully. Mary submits steps to reproduce into the system and as a small reward takes a little break. Then they  discuss the new user story with Pete (30 min). They discuss specs, some unclear areas, etc.

After the meeting, she writes checklist for the user story (1 hr). Then goes for lunch.

After the lunch she comes back and checks if there are any new tasks. No new tasks, so she calls Ted to help her with Linux. She spends 1 hour with Ted setting everything up. Then Mary verifies several UI bugs on Linux. Suddenly during exploratory testing she finds a new nasty bug - null reference exception when clicking on Delete User button. She captures the screenshot and adds bug into the system. This bug blocks verification process and Mary notifies team lead about the problem. And goes to smoke one more cigarette.

It is 5 pm already, so for the rest of the day she chats with friends and reads some interesting blog posts and articles. Suddenly she remembers that Katy returned from vacation today, so she calls for her and talks about Florida and Miami. Then Mary checks email and goes home at 6:30 pm.

Goal-oriented Scenarios

Mary has her own goals.

What did I do yesterday?

Mary comes to the office  in the morning, logs in into the system and wants to see all her yesterday’s work before the daily meeting. She sees:

  • daily meeting attended (10:00 - 10:20)
  • for story “As an admin I want to un-delete projects”
    • Test Cases ran
    • Bug “Crash when click Un-delete in FireFox” added
    • Bug “Main label has strange color on Un-delete screen” added
    • Bug “Buttons overlap in Safari on Un-delete screen” added
  • comment added for the bug “Ugly button formatting in Add User page”
  • Read article “Kanban and Functional Testing” (done)
  • Personal task “Install new version of Skype” added

System reminds Mary that she forgot to add time for all yesterday’s tasks, so she adds time quickly without any redirects.

I want to plan my day

After yesterday’s work review, Mary wants to see today’s meetings, all tasks and focus on high priority tasks (bugs, stories, tasks) with estimates, new tasks. She sees:

  • daily meeting (10:00 - 10:20)
  • 3 UI bugs to verify
  • for user story “As a developer I want to find all usages of the method quickly”
    • meeting with developer (deadline today, highlighted)
    • create test cases
    • run test cases
  • create test cases for user story “As an admin I want to delete comments”
  • Smoke testing of new build on Thursday
  • Retrospective meeting on Friday (undefined time)
  • Demo meeting on Friday (15:00-16:00)
  • Read “Why FitNesse rocks” article

Mary wants to plan her day, so she marks tasks for today, and as a result she has 2 groups of tasks (Today, Later). Suddenly she remembers that she forgot to report a bug yesterday, so she adds this task for today quickly.

What’s new  today?

Mary comes back from diner and opens her dashboard. She wants to know which comments have been added to her items, which new meetings scheduled, new bugs added or bug states updated.  A blocking bug “Crash on user add” was added  and already fixed by Tom.  She sees that nobody is assigned as a verifier for this bug and she assigns this bug to herself to verify the fix asap. Also she sees that a new comment has been added for a bug in her todo list. She reads the comment and replies quickly. Also she notes that someone has added the UI bug that she forgot to add yesterday. So she closes the related task.

The next step is to gather scenarios for the other personas, combine them, analyze them and create wireframes for the new ToDo list. Something tells me it will be powerful. And we should keep it as simple as required, but not simpler ;)

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Re-designing ToDo List: Personas

Posted by Michael Dubakov in UI, Uncategorized, design, developing, usability on October 5th, 2009

We are incorporating UX practices into our development process. It is not so easy, the first attempt was with Eclipse plugin. Second one is ToDo list re-design. I don’t know what will be the end result. Maybe we will merge several screens into one (for example, Time Sheet and ToDo list), maybe something else, but we are starting from scratch and focusing on the needs of real users. We are going to write scenarios for all personas, create flows and wireframes, create prototypes and test them on real customers. Let’s see how it goes.

Recently we’ve had a series of meetings dedicated to Personas. There were several testers, several developers and product owner on the meeting. We’ve spent about 5 hours in total and here are some results.

Personas important for ToDo list are marked with a green circle. Manual Tester is selected as a key persona (double circled).

personas1

junior

Andy is a serious geek. It was easy, since we have a former game developer on board :)

senior

Everybody agreed that Alan is a true designer. Someone even said that he knows a very similar guy working as a web designer.

designer

And our development team likes the approach.

like

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