TargetProcess Product Blog

People ask this question quite often as probably there’s no quick shortcut from Kanban Board/Task board to the screen where customization is done.

Now, let’s see how we can change/add states for User Stories in Kanban board. The key to customizing columns is essentially changing states for User Stories. So, here’s our Kanban board:

We’ve got 5 states for User Stories in there: Planned, In Progress, In Testing, Analysis, Done.  Let’s suppose we want to remove Analysis column and replace it with Ready to Merge Column.

We need to go to Admin-Processes, and select the Process used for our Project (Kanban process in our case). Then we go to Workflow for User Story:

All of our existing states for User Stories are in there. Let’s now edit the states – replace the Analysis with Ready to Merge State:

Don’t forget to click Save in the Add/Edit Entity State window, then Save Workflow.

Now let’s see what happens with the columns in our Kanban board:

Ready to Merge column is right there!

This works the same for Task Board. You need to add/edit/remove states for Tasks in Admin-Processes-Task-Workflow-Change State to customize columns in Task Board.

Here are shots of Task Boards for previous and current iterations. Nothing special with these boards: user stories on the left, tasks as stick notes, tasks statuses columns. Each developer has own color and this gives more personal visibility.

Iteration #12.3

Iteration #12.4

We’ve finished first TP 2.4 iteration today and decided to show intermediate results for all who interested. We’ve implemented quite many nice features during last two weeks and want to get early feedback (yes, we’ve released TP 2.3 two weeks ago and new release is coming within 3 weeks). TP 2.4 preview available at http://preview.targetprocess.com (admin / admin).

Implemented stories:

• Impediments management
• Task Board
• Paging in Iteration Plan
• Tp.Tray: ToDo component
• Change state action simplified
• Date and RichEdit custom fields
• Filter by custom fields in lists
• Scheduled reports (Bugs Burn Down by State)
• Finish Latest Iteration (automatically split/move user stories to the next iteration)
• Split User Story

As mentioned in latest post we are working on better SCRUM support in TargetProcess. One of the core feature is TaskBoard that powers daily Scrum meetings.

The usual actions for Scrum Master during Scrum meetings are:

• Change Task state (In Progress or Done for example)
• Assign tasks (or subscribe to task for developer)
• Add new task
• Add impediments and see blocking tasks and stories
• Update remaining time

TargetProcess TaskBoard supports all that things (see screenshot). It is already implemented in fact and requires just some polishing.

Despite the release of TP 2.3 several days ago we’ve already started TP 2.4 development which will be released in early May. Yeah, project heartbeat is rapid. The TP 2.4 release focuses on two things:

1. Better SCRUM support
2. Better reporting

The reasons behind the first goal are quite simple. SCRUM is the most used agile methodology and TargetProcess lacks several core features from SCRUM:

• Daily SCRUM meetings management
• Different terminology
• Impediments management

While they are not show stoppers for TP usage for SCRUM, they do affect overall impression and product usability.

It is possible to put data about tasks progress nicely into TP if developers do that themselves, but on SCRUM meetings ScrumMaster do that job and he needs more simple way. He needs a single screen where he can do all progress/status updates.

It is possible to learn that sprint is an iteration in TargetProcess, but it is not comfortable and we don’t like when you feel any discomfort with TP.

It is possible to manage impediments in Excel, but TP is integrated tool and designed to replace Excelish stuff for agile development in fact.

So all the features above will be implemented in TP 2.4. ScrumMaster will have Task Board where he will be able to change task states, reassign tasks, update remaining effort, add impediments and so on. ScrumMaster will have impediments management functionality, he will be able to create impediments, bind them to user stories, make them private or public, track them and easily see all impediments for user story, task or bug. And all TP users will benefit from customizable terminology and finally you will see Sprints instead Iterations everywhere in TP.

We think that with TP 2.4 release TargetProcess will be SCRUM-ready (i.e. easy to use in scrum environment).