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Importing and Exporting your data

mark — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:53:40 +0000

Getting your data in and out of an web based system is really important. It’s great to be in “the cloud” but you should not sacrifice control and ownership of your information. That’s why Agile Bench has both importing and exporting capabilities.

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.

Inlined editing now available

craig — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:32:38 +0000

After using Agile bench as much as we have, you soon realize that it’s a bit of a chore having to navigate to the edit story screen to update story details, so following our standard rule of thumb of if it makes our lives easy it will make your lives easy to, we have implemented in lined editing. Just click on the story from the iteration management page and you can update the story title, assigned developers or delivery estimate.

To go to the full story edit page, just click on the arrow head to the left of the story ID.

How we got here

craig — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 08:21:03 +0000

Before Shot

The first release of Agile Bench was built over the last 9 months (yes that’s a lot of weekends and nights). We wanted to get a product into production as quickly as possible so we created an Information Architecture (IA) based around our domain model and then released this version to a group of close friends. Once we were in alpha, we started to use Agile Bench to manage our own project which was a real eye opener, it didn’t take long before we discovered some key issues that needed to be resolved, part if this was own to the IA, primary activities were elongated due to navigational and flow issues.

To take Agile Bench to the next level ready for a full release we decided to use a persona based approached to rework the IA.

We defined 3 key personas, a delivery manager, a developer (to cover tech, UX and testing) and a product manager. Firstly we gave the personas some background including previous experience, focus and responsibilities. Then we identified the tasks that each persona would undertake and prioritized them based on how important we thought they were to project success.

After Shot

Once we had identified the key activities we reworked the IA to make those activities as straight forward as possible putting the right information in an easy to understand structure.

As you can see from the before and after screen shots, the IA of the site changed quite dramatically.

The persona based approach worked really well and we plan to continue using these key personas to design and deliver future requirements.

Agile Practices Survey

craig — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 22:18:22 +0000

The first release of Agile Bench was designed around the issues that have affected our own agile projects. We’re now thinking about what should come next and we wanted to understand what other agile teams think makes the difference between good and bad projects, success and failure.

To help us with this, we’ve created a small survey, it should only take a bout 5 minutes to fill out and we will be publishing the results on our blog around the middle of September. It would be great if you could take the time to fill it out - Agile Practices Survey.

Thanks in advance from the Agile Bench team.

(PS if anyone is thinking about doing a survey for their own project then I can’t recommend WufOO more highly, this app is really easy to use and gives you a lot of control over look and feel.)

So why Agile Bench?

craig — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:12:55 +0000

We’ve been involved with software development since the mid 90s, initially using waterfall type methods and then with agile approaches such as Scrum, XP and DSDM. What we realised was there wasn’t a standout tool that could help us run our projects. We wanted to create a tool that supports the key activities that make the difference between a project being a success and a failure.

Agile Bench helps you plan and track your project, it improves project communications and ensures that everybody on your team knows what’s going on.

We’ve started this blog to keep in touch with you, to let you know about the new features we plan on building and to get you feedback on what we’ve built so far. We also hope to give you our thoughts on agile development practices, what has worked for us in the past, where we’ve had problems and what other agilists are talking about and doing.

So, thanks for checking us and Agile Bench out. Hopefully we’ve grabbed your interest so why not ty us out, Agile Bench.