Archive for category whatis

New: Bug Pain Plugin - No Pains!

Posted by Olga Kouzina in plugin, whatis on February 17th, 2010

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.

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Customer Support with TargetProcess HelpDesk-Solutions

Posted by Olga Kouzina in help desk, whatis on January 27th, 2010

We’ve implemented Solutions  in TargetProcess HelpDesk about a  year ago but sometimes people still ask what’s the surplus value of this feature.  So let’s look into it now.

If you’re dealing with customers and with their questions/requests,  the questions are the same very often, so as a customer support person/account manager you have to type in same answers to same questions over again.

That’s why we implemented the Solutions feature. You can think of all the typical questions, put them in to HelpDesk as Solutions and save your time.

attachsolutiondetailed1

See the general workflow of TargetProcess HelpDesk if you haven’t used it up to now.

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Updated Rank Concept in TargetProcess

Posted by Olga Kouzina in whatis on December 8th, 2009

Quite often we’re asked about the concept of Rank in TargetProcess, how it is calculated, and how someone can change it, so in this post we’ll get more insight into that.

Before the 2.17.2 release, the concept of Rank worked to prioritize entities with the same Business Value e.g.  for  several Must Have User Stories - you could drag and drop some User Story and thus assign a higher priority.  Rank was related  to Business value: the higher rank, the higher value and the more important User Story was.

Starting from release 2.17.2  we have changed the concept: now Rank is not directly related to Business Value and it works more as  Order concept than Rank. A number of our clients have requested this feature, so we implemented this  to provide more flexibility for work with User Stories queue. For example, you might have a User Story with Nice to Have value, but for some reason it needs to be implemented first from all the queue  of User Stories with all Business Values. Possible reasons for that: a developer who can do this User Story has no other tasks now, the Must Have User Stories are waiting on someone else etc.  So this User Story can be placed on top of the list in Prioritize screen:

prioritize-backlog-rank

You can  also reorder User Stories and Bugs  in Iteration Planning area. In the screenshot below, “Galaxy Points” User Story has got a higher Rank although it’s got only Great business value as opposed to Must Have values of lower ranked User Stories:

rank-in-iteration-plan

See our User Guide for Rank Concept as well.

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