TargetProcess 2009 Retrospective

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...