Posts Tagged new feature
New: Active Role Highlight
Posted by Olga Kouzina in Uncategorized on February 24th, 2010
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:
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:
“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:
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:
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.
New: Visual Bugs and Tasks Count In Kanban
Posted by Olga Kouzina in Uncategorized on February 11th, 2010
We released TargetProcess 2.18.2 today with several fixes and cute pics in Kanban board: visual bugs and tasks count for user stories.
This is not an ultimate health diagnostic utility for user stories, but it’s at least possible to see right away how many bugs and tasks are wrapped in in it.
If you have any better images for “bugs” and “tasks” :), you’re welcome to submit your comments to TargetProcess UX Group:
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:
Anti-Hollywood: No Actors, only Roles in TargetProcess
Posted by Olga Kouzina in usability on February 4th, 2010
In the new 2.18 release we got rid of an obsolete entity that existed in TargetProcess since primeval times and caused lots of questions and confusions from our customers. We removed Actors.
That’s how the workflow edit screen looked previously — each entity state was supposed to have an Actor, and Actors were supposed to be managed for this single purpose:
Roles were supposed to be managed as well in another screen. This added confusion — what is Actor, what is Role, where Actor should be applied, where Role etc. Now Roles are used for workflow setup as well, and there are no Actors anymore.
In a nutshell, Actors were waste. We’re looking now to make TargetProcess less clicky, more crispy and laconic. So we said “bye” to Actors and now go only with Roles.
TargetProcess 2.17: what’s new
Posted by Olga Kouzina in Uncategorized on January 20th, 2010
As we’re working on the major winter release, let’s take a closer look at some selected new features that appeared in TargetProcess 2.17 so far:
1. Custom fields in Time Sheet:
2. Custom Reports Editing: you can now click Save As and edit some selected criteria without creating this report from scratch as it previously was:
3. Quick add Test Cases: now it’s possible to add a Test Case right from User Story view. Several clicks saved:
4. Items count in Kanban board columns:
5. Much requested “no release” filter has been added to User Stories list. Now you can filter out the User Stories that are not included to Releases:
6. Much requested as well - logged user full name is now displayed:
7. Change Password functionality added to Settings:
The new prioritize screen, improved search, Eclipse/Mylyn integration also appeared in TargetProcess v 2.17. We’ll keep you posted of the updates.
Improved Search in TargetProcess 2.17
Posted by Olga Kouzina in Uncategorized on January 19th, 2010
Improved Search in TargetProcess 2.17 is one of those small but essential updates wanted for quite a long time.
Previously, only names and description fields of entities were searched. Now search runs in comments as well:
It’s possible to filter out search results based on states:
and based on Types:
See our change log for more updates in TargetProcess 2.17.
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:
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…
Kanban Items Count and State Filter in Search Results
Posted by Olga Kouzina in Uncategorized on December 9th, 2009
Just a quick overview of 2 small but nice features, new in recent builds:
Items count displayed in Kanban board columns
Take a look at the screenshot:
Now we’ve got color coding to indicate whether the count of items in a given column/state in Kanban board exceeds the allowed limit (by the way, setting limits is done in one of the grey boxes on the upper right called “Customize”.)
With red arrows on the screenshot above, we see that for In Progress column 5 items is a limit and 5 items are in progress. All OK - the color is grey — it’s about neutrality. For Coded column, we’ve got the red light — the limit is 3, and currently as many as 7 entities are in this state. With Ready to Merge column — no items are there, and the limit is 3, so we’ve got the light green color for this column. It’s almost like traffic lights
Ability to filter by State added to Search column.
See the screenshot:
For example, as a Product Owner you might want to filter out all the entities in Open state based on some keyword (search string) — “effort” as in the screenshot.
In the future we’re going to implement more advanced filtering for search. As soon as next week we will enable search in Comments fields (not only in Name and in Description), so this small update with filtering by State is our first step towards powerful search capabilities in TargetProcess.
Please, refer to our change log for the complete list of all the updates and fixes in the latest builds.
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:
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:
See our User Guide for Rank Concept as well.
Agile Software
TargetProcess is an agile project management software. It is designed to solve distributed teams problems and support agile development processes.
Key Features
- Full Agile Project Management Support (Scrum, Kanban, XP, Hybrid)
- Productivity Tools (Tp.Tray, ToDo list, dashboards, Inline editing)
- Customizable Development Process
- Subversion Integration
- Integrated Bug Tracking, Help Desk, Time Tracking
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