Project planners (like the CEO of a small company, the product manager or technical lead) want to get a feel of what the next few iterations are going to look like but don’t want to assign stories to iterations just to see how much work they can get done. So we’ve created projected iterations.

Projected what?

Nobody can see the future, so all we can do is guess what the future will look like. We use fancy terms like “projected” and “extrapolated” to make us feel better, but at the end of the day they are our best guess given our current information with a few assumptions mixed in for good measure.

With this in mind it would be great if our planners could see what the next few iterations may look like and that is where projected iterations come in. Agile Bench takes the team’s velocity and uses it to assess what future iterations may contain and visibly shows these projected iterations within the backlog.

(click to enlarge) This project has a velocity of 13. There will be a projected iteration at 13pts, 26pts, 39pts, etc...

It should take away some of the manual counting we see teams do when they are trying to work out what is roughly going to be in scope for the next few iterations.

We see this feature being enhanced in the future. We’d love to know what you think and if you’ve got any ideas.

Go on and sign up for a free trial from our homepage and test it out for yourself.

A special thanks goes to Roman Pichler (@romanpichler) as we’ve references two of his articles in this post.

I was fortunate enough to rack up enough votes to speak on whether “Agile Software Development Prevent Rounded Products.”  I’ve attached the slides below but please go to the slideshare site and turn on the notes, that is where lot of the good bits are.

I also want to say thanks to Mishymash, who was attentive enough to take some great notes of my session too in mind map form (they look great, please check them out).

• to do
• in progress
• done

The original version of Agile Bench has this encoded in it’s DNA.  This works well for small team, but as your team gets larger there is often the desire to have more fine grained control of the “in progress” state.

We’re now expanding our functionality by allowing you to change the workflow states.

You can add in new workflow states, they can be renamed at any time and best of all you can rearrange the workflow states by dragging and dropping them.  So easy!

The new workflow editor

There are a couple of things to know.  Changes to workflow states affect the whole project, not just the current iteration.  The backlog now only has the first (the to do) workflow state.  When a workflow state is deleted, all the stories in that state are moved the bottom of previous available state.  Finally, you can’t delete the first or last workflow states (you’ve got to start and end somewhere) but they can be renamed.

We have not put in the ability to restrict transitions between workflow states (such as by role).  At Agile Bench we believe this should be managed with conversation, not via a tool.

We’d love you feedback.  Do you like what were doing at the moment?

Please log in or create a free project and check out the changes.

Today we just want to provide a bit of a glimpse of what we’ve been up to.  Over the next few months we’ll be rolling out more information on how we’re helping teams get their work done.  We expect the story wall will be particularly helpful for geographically distributed teams.

New Story Wall

The new interface has stories that somewhat look like cards with:

• a story type in the top right hand corner (story, bug, chore, epic)
• people allocated to the story (yes, more than one person can be assigned to a story) down the bottom
• points on the bottom right hand side
• the ability to color code your stories in any way you see fit.
• a full drag and drop interface for moving stories, just like you would on a real story wall

The Story Wall is new so need your feedback.  Please send any thoughts on our new story wall through to us either as comments here or to me mark at agilebench dot com.

The next few months are going to be very exciting for Agile Bench.  Stay tuned.  This is going to be fun!

Is this thing on? by theilr @ flickr

The Global Product Management Talk brings international product managers together with experts in their field, weekly in a twitter chat format.  Cindy F. Solomon and Adrienne Tan (brainmates) have set up a preeminent list of speakers of which we are humbled to be a part of.

I’ll be “talking” with Cindy and Adrienne  on Monday March 21st 3-4pm (Californian time)/Tuesday March 22nd 10-11am (Sydney time).  The easiest way to follow along is to:

• Follow @ProdMgmtTalk
• Join in using hashtag #ProdMgmtTalk weekly at Twebevent or Tweetchat

See you online.

We’ve made a small update before christmas that beautifies the Account Settings screen.  You now have the option to add in your name which we’ll instead of your login or email account throughout the system.  It makes everything look much nicer.  We’ve also added in your avatar picture.  We use gravatar.com avatars on our site which we love.  It is the standard way to host your avatars online so it just makes sense for us to use them.  We’ve got some big things brewing for the early part of next year.  Stay tuned!

Here is the good news! We are opening up our API and we are very excited about it.

The new API give you programmatic access to Iterations, Stories and Comments for your project. We’ve worked hard at putting together high quality documentation. I’ll put out a few examples here to highlight how the API works.

All methods require authentication before we’ll hand over your precious data (we very much care about the privacy and safety of your data). We provide authentication via a token which must be supplied in the HTTP request. You can find your token on the account setting page.

Projects

Available methods:

• Get all project for the current user
• Get a single project for the current user

When a project is requested basic information such as the iteration sizes and title are returned. Also included in the returned payload is a list of users who are members of the project.

e.g. curl -H "X-AgileBench-Token: TOKEN" -H "Content-type: application/json" http://agilebench.local/api/v1/projects/477

{
    "confidence_tolerance": 20,
    "created_at": "2010-04-05T00:00:00Z",
    "estimate_values": "1,2,3,5,8,unestimated",
    "id": 477,
    "iteration_size_unit": "week",
    "iteration_start_day": "Monday",
    "iteration_unit": 2,
    "title": "Art Social Networking Site (DEMO)",
    "uri": "/projects/477-art-social-networking-site-demo",
    "users": [
        {
            "id": 6704,
            "login": "max",
            "role": "Owner",
            "state": "active",
            "uri": "/projects/477-art-social-networking-site-demo/users/6704"
        },
        {
            "id": 6705,
            "login": "kit",
            "role": "Collaborator",
            "state": "active",
            "uri": "/projects/477-art-social-networking-site-demo/users/6705"
        },
        {
            "id": 6706,
            "login": "sidney",
            "role": "Collaborator",
            "state": "active",
            "uri": "/projects/477-art-social-networking-site-demo/users/6706"
        }
    ],
    "velocity": 13
}

Iterations

Available methods:

• Get an iteration (standard iteration, current iteration or backlog)
• Get all iterations for a project

Let’s say you would like to get a list of stories in your backlog.
e.g.
curl -H "X-AgileBench-Token: TOKEN" -H "Content-type: application/json" http://agilebench.local/api/v1/projects/{project_id}/backlog

Which will return the backlog and the stories within the backlog:

{
    "id": 1324,
    "position": 1,
    "project_id": 477,
    "stories": [
        {
            "blocked": false,
            "comments_count": 0,
            "created_at": "2010-06-14T00:00:00Z",
            "estimate": "5 points",
            "label": 44,
            "position": 1,
            "story_type": "story",
            "title": "As a site owner I want to charge users for an account",
            "updated_at": "2010-06-14T00:00:00Z",
            "uri": "http://agilebench.local/projects/477-art-social-networking-site-demo/stories/44",
            "workflow_state": "todo"
        },
        ...
    ],
    "title": "Backlog",
    "uri": "http://agilebench.local/projects/477-art-social-networking-site-demo/backlog",
    "workflow_state": "todo"
}

Stories

Available methods:

• Get a story
• Get all stories for an iteration
• Update a story

Let’s say you would like to update a story
e.g.
curl -X PUT -H "X-AgileBench-Token: TOKEN" -H "Content-type: application/json" http://agilebench.local/api/v1/projects/{project_id}/stories/{story_id} -d '{"estimate":"1 point","workflow_state":"in_progress"}'

Which will return the updated story:

{
    "blocked": false,
    "comments_count": 0,
    "created_at": "2010-06-14T00:00:00Z",
    "estimate": "1 point",
    "label": 15,
    "position": 1,
    "story_type": "story",
    "title": "As a site owner I want to create a blog",
    "updated_at": "2010-10-25T20:09:07Z",
    "uri": "http://agilebench.local/projects/477-art-social-networking-site-demo/stories/15",
    "workflow_state": "in_progress"
}

There are a couple of differences here from the backlog request we showed before. Firstly we’ve had to specify the PUT HTTP verb to signify we are updating a resource. We also have to provide the data required to update the story, in this case we’re updating the estimate and we’re transitioning the story to being “in progress” from todo. A list of the attributes that can be updated can be found in the “API docs”|http://agilebench.com/api/.

It’s also worth noting that stories don’t have an id, they have a label as their primary key (which is namespaced by the project id).

Comments

Available methods:

• Get all comments for an story
• Create a new comment

Let’s say you would like to create a comment on a story
e.g.
curl -X POST -H "X-AgileBench-Token: TOKEN" -H "Content-type: application/json" http://agilebench.local/api/v1/projects/{project_id}/stories/{story_id}/comments -d '{"text": "Here is my comment"}'

Which will return the newly created comment:

{
    "id": 442,
    "text": "Here is my comment",
    "user": {
        "display_name": "Max Bench",
        "uri": "/projects/477-art-social-networking-site-demo/users/6704"
    }
}

We are already using this internally for source code callbacks into Agile Bench.

Why we’re publishing these APIs

We know there are a lot more ideas and energy outside of the Agile Bench walls than inside it. We want to open up our platform and let others make beautiful things happen.

We have more in store. We also would love your feedback and look forward to more API goodness.

We’ve been talking with you, our customers, and you’ve been telling us that you want more help getting started on a project.  We could write loads or documentation, or, we could just put up a video.  We chose the video.  Behold!  A video you can send to your collegues to show them how easy it is to get started with Agile Bench.

Agile Bench – Getting Started from Agile Bench on Vimeo.

The video can also be found on our wiki.

Share and enjoy!

Import and Export actions

Import

If you are moving from another system, or just wanted to give Agile Bench a try with your real data, then why retype everything? You shouldn’t! We’ve built a way for you to import your stories right into Agile Bench.

Fields that can be imported (Click for larger view)

If your data is in another online system you should be able to export it into a CSV file (and if you can’t, that should worry you) and then upload. We know a lot of people use Excel as their project management tool which also allows you to export your data as a CSV.

Now you are up and running with a minimum of fuss.

Export

Exporting your data is even more straight forward than importing your data. You’ll get the following fields: ID, Title, Story Type, Estimate, Current State, Deadline, Created At, Details, Iteration Name, Iteration Position.

Export your project for use in Excel (Click for larger view)

Going forward – the API

We want to make it easier for you and your company to manage their data.  We are really excited to have an API in beta mode.  If you’d like access please drop us a line.