ScrumDesk 5: Release and Sprint Planning, Autofill, Multiple tabs

ScrumDesk just gets better!

We invest a lot of effort to bring this release, but only now we are delighted to see how much we have done!
We would like to thank all people sending us feedbacks, comments, and requests. Let us send our ‘Thank you’ to Nicolò Carandini, people from Coopex Soft, to Giavinh and many others that did not forget to ask us about improvements!

New features

Top three features?

1. New grid with lot of new capabilities
2. Multiple tabs
3. Tons of improvements

Grids

We are happy to announce upgraded grids providing a new experience and features you wanted from us for a long time:

• Performance, performance, performance, memory
• Hide/display columns
• Sub-totals calculation
• saved UI customization (displayed fields, an order of columns)
• improved editing (Excel experience)
• Data filtering by selection from list (like in Excel)
• Multiple data filtering
• Possibility to fix columns in a grid
• Position information while scrolling

Improved were all grids (impediments, absences, stories, ideas, team, etc.).

Multiple tabs

Multiple views on data stored in ScrumDesk are necessary especially if planning stories or tracking more parallel sprints, projects or products. ScrumDesk now displays sprints, backlog or retrospective in multiple tabs.

Click the first button to see all boards at once.

Desk Auto layout

Card positioning can be boring especially while creating a big backlog.  ScrumDesk now allows users to auto layout cards into multiple columns and rows according to three criteria’s.  Enter a number of cards in a row, then select first criteria to sort stories according to and optionally choose other criteria.

Progress line

Recognize status of your sprint without a click. Desk view now provides visibility to the status of stories in the current sprint. Status of stories is indicated by integrated chart and using status colors.

Roles names customization

ScrumDesk is used by non-IT companies as well. Their pain were names of roles that did not fit into their environment. As Scrum Master, you can assign aliases to roles integrated into ScrumDesk.

Email notification

Notification by email was improved. Now you will know about changes of stories, comments or impediments. We will send you information about what part of the story has been changed.

Notification can be enabled/disabled by the user. Emails are sent every 10 minutes and before exit.

Stories

Story Type

Organize stories in a new way. ScrumDesk brings the best possibilities on market to organize stories by different attributes while they are still not required.

Story types allow product owners to mark stories as user stories, technical stories, defects, epics, etc.  Types are fully customizable by Scrum Master or Product Owner on the Project page. Type can be entered in story detail window or grid. Validate status of stories based on type in the treemap.

Flagged story

Team members need to flag stories they should work later. This small, but handy feature brings this capability to story card, detail and stories grid. Flagged story is marked with a small star. Flag/Unflag the story by click on this star.

 Internal story

Why Internal story? Some stories should not be visible by visitors even if they are allowed to log in to project. Click symbol in story card’s toolbar or in detail window and only non-visitors will be able to see and access them. Consider that export of internal stories will not filter them.

Private story

Even agile environment must support sharing of information (as openness is fundamental principle) we decided to implement the possibility to markup story as private. This way team members can hide stories that are not relevant for team members and can be considered as a personal To-do list.

MoSCoW prioritization

MoSCoW is a way how to easy prioritize stories into basics groups (Must have, Should have, Nice to have, Won’t have). See more in this Wikipedia article.

You can prioritize stories in story detail window or grid. Check distribution of stories using tree map to validate your priorities and current status.

Move story to Backlog

The story can be moved back to backlog dropping it on the Side view or in Planning. Now this action is simplified by selection of from Sprint combo box in story detail window.

Story’s people

The panel at the bottom of desk displays pictures of people working on selected stories. Click on a story or select more of them and you see all developers at once. We will bring much more with another new release!

Release

Types

Release types are very often used in enterprise companies to ensure that release will fit the correct environment. There are different types (production, internal, testing, development etc.). The good news? Release types are customizable in project customization page!

Release status

Real experience and your feedback learned us that not every release is the same.

You need to recognize not just status of sprints or stories, but releases as well.

Product Owner or Scrum Master can now enter the status of the release from combo box located in release dialog. Current statuses? Fully customizable, but we deliver default statuses (Planned, Developed, Completed).

Release and Sprint Planning

The most visible change of UI was implemented in Planning view.

We hope this change will:

• help you to provide much more information necessary for planning in the same view
• Allows to see more stories
• Identify them as ID is displayed on cards
• See status of sprints backlogs by new status track area
• validate the relative availability of team members as they are displayed at the bottom of the planning screen
• see best practices value to better estimate capacity of your next sprint
• edit sprints details in place
• work better with a unique feature on the market: possibility to plan more releases in one sprint and break release into more sprints.
• double-click release or sprint in top list to display details
• double-click stories to display story detail
• drag stories between the lists
• Sort stories by status

Autofill sprint

To make planning easier we implemented Autofill sprint capability. Stories will be moved to sprint backlog according to Importance up to the capacity of the sprint.

Configure capacity of the Sprint, check if stories effort is estimated & press Autofill button. Stories will be automatically moved into a sprint!

Planning Poker

Compare complexity of user stories

Many of you asked to improve a view of stories displayed in planning poker lists (smaller, larger) and implement grouping of them according to an effort.

Grouping combines the best approaches to estimate stories: Planning Poker and team relative calibration.

Activities

We redesigned how activities are displayed so they are more readable and information are grouped by type, id and time.

Now you can filter activities in some period which provides the perfect possibility to get through project’s history.

What we improved:

• Filtering data
  • information bar indicates active filter
  • filter available by click on the Filter button in right top corner
  • filter ‘By modified date’ and enabled highlight is indicated too
• Board
  • the board is loaded now 50% faster
  • zoom is restored when switching between different backlogs
  • less memory is required now due to simpler card UI
• Fixes