TargetProcess Product Blog

Mashups are gaining power. We already have a dozen Mashups in our public mashups library. If you have TargetProcess On-Site or Free edition, you can freely download and use all the mashups. On-Demand mashups are on the way.

Here is an example of REST API and Mashups usage to create a nice report. This report is available in Reports section in TargetProcess and shows how many user stories were implemented for a particular month, for all the projects.

You can see which projects are loaded and which projects are on hold, in an instant.

You can select Bugs, Issues and Features as well. Here is a zoom-in on this report.

It took 8 hours for an inexperienced Javascript developer  to create this mashup. So, even CEO can create Mashups in TargetProcess.

You just completed last Sprint and started a new one. You split some user stories and decide to check your Sprint Burn Down chart. And it looks like that.

What happened? Why do you see such progress for the first day? Actually, there are several reasons:

1. You have moved some unfinished tasks with Time spent. It means in the current Sprint you have tasks that are already in progress and TargetProcess just sums up all the time spent over previous days. In other words, it takes some velocity from previous Sprint and moves it to the current Sprint.
2. You have moved some stories with completed tasks. Again, TargetProcess views them as completed in the current Sprint.

To have a more accurate burn down chart, follow the following tips:

1. Have as small stories as possible.
2. Have as small tasks as possible. It is better to have 4 tasks with 8 hrs each than 1 task with 32 hrs.
3. Split stories and keep completed tasks in previous Sprint.
4. Complete as many tasks as possible in a Sprint. It is better to have 6 tasks completed and 4 not started than 4 tasks completed and 6 started.

This update has some bugs fixed and was released on November 5 to free customers.
OnDemand accounts will be updated in a few days.

Quite often we’re asked questions on how to align TargetProcess agile framework with down-to-earth life — like expenses forecast, sum of efforts based on resource usage for each particular activity, the total cost of the project. These items sound more MS Project like (check what we think of MS Project) but we give credit to the real business needs and in this post we’ll share a technique to get those reports and calculations.

Suppose, you’re planning a project. You need to calculate the efforts and costs for QA, implementation, deployment to production, post production support etc. Each user story has all these stages, but they intertwine without following each other linearly (read more on the benefits of feature-based development vs. stage-based development )

To track these activities/stages across an iteration or a release, you can create tasks within a user story, like here:

You can create custom report that will calculate total time for Specification, Development, Testing, Test Cases across iteration. Here’s how:

And here’s the report:

Time reports can be used for cost calculations based on an hourly rate.

You’re welcome to comment and contact us with questions about your particular custom reporting case.

How much time we spent on a particular release? Quite interesting question that can be answered using Custom Reports functionality. For example, last release of TargetProcess v.2.12 took about 5,500 hours. That is MUCH more than any of the previous releases. OK, let’s try to create the report.

Step 1

Navigate to Custom Reports and click Create New report button. Select Release entity.

Step 2

Add Start Date and End Date fields to the report in Fields tab.

Step 3

Click to Summary Fields tab and specify new summary field as shown on the picture below

Step 4

Click Settings tab, specify report name and Run it.

We’ve completed Iteration #12.4 and added some really nice features into Report Engine. It is possible to add summary columns, group entities and add simple charts. Here are some examples of real reports (they are working)

We will add some fancy functions during next two weeks and most likely v.2.7 with Report Engine will be released in the middle of December. So far you may play with Report Engine at http://preview.targetprocess.com (admin / admin).

Today we’ve completed third iteration of v.2.7. Report engine implementation going really well and right now it is possible to extract list of entities with

• defined columns (including related entities columns)
• set columns order
• defined filters (including related entities filters)

For example, you may extract all user stories with all columns like Name, Effort, Iteration Name, Feature Name where User Story Effort = 0 and User Story Feature Priority is Must Have.

It is required to add calculations to the reports engine as well as more flexible columns. In final release it will be possible to create let’s say a report like that

Development of Program Releases Management is in progress as well. In this iteration we’ve added product backlog to release plan with sorting and filtering options. There are some things to do in next iteration like drag and drop planning, release date forecasting and some smaller things.

Also we’ve integrated Selenium tests with Cruise Control and at least we have good build process setup :)

We are continuing development of v.2.7. It will contain such things as program level release planning and custom reporting. Also we are re-styling user interface. You may check progress at preview.targetprocess.com (admin / admin)

Program level release planning will resolve many problems of large projects. It will provide full view on all projects releases and will allow to synchronize releases and re-plan them. Also it will show planned and forecasted product release dates.

Planning will work via drag and drop. We think that this feature will be great for product planning and high level progress tracking.

Today we’ve released new version of TargetProcess. This release was SCRUM oriented and many things for better scrum support were added like customizable terminology, Task Board and impediments management. Now TargetProcess fits greatly for SCRUM dev. process and if you use SCRUM you should take a look at it.

The other goal was better reporting. Now you may generate various reports for several projects using simple UI.

As usual, this release contains many usability and productivity improvements. For example, you may select current iteration or release in drop downs with one click, finish iteration with two clicks and split user story with easy.

TargetProcess is available as On-Site or On-Demand version ($25 per user per month). We are receiving more and more very positive feedback from customers. So go ahead and try TP, you will be satisfied :)