Agile Bench » Features

Features – the categorization of stories

Mark Mansour — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 21:57:54 +0000

Stories are great. They allow agile teams to express their work in units that are valuable to you, their business owner. They can be estimated reasonably well since they’re small and they can be traded off against each other and prioritized by you, the business owner. The down side of stories is that you have lots of them which can make it hard to see the big picture. How do you see the wood for the trees?

To better understand a mass of information, we generalize and we categorize. Agile Bench has added the “Features” feature as a way of categorizing stories. Each story can now belong to a feature allowing you to break your stories into business oriented chunks.

Features are stories categorized into business oriented groups

We’ve worked hard to make features easy to use. Features can be added whilst editing a story.

Or you can bulk edit your backlog stories and add them (or remove them) from a feature.

Categorize features in bulk

We’ve also got a page to manage your features. On the Manage Features page you can add, edit, delete and color your features.

Once you’ve categorized your stories you can quickly filter the backlog and get insight into how big the feature is. We’ll have another post on search soon.

Quickly show only the feature you're focused on

Features give you a very powerful way to slice and dice your backlog. Let us known how you find it.

Mike Cohn, of Mountain Goat Software, has a good article on features (although he calls them Themes). As he notes, the terminology isn’t that important as long as everyone agrees on what it means in their context.

On an aside, Agile Bench currently has epics, which is one of our issue types. We don’t recomment using epics as we’ll be phasing them out soon.

Keyboard Shortcuts – from Novice to Ninja!

Mark Mansour — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 21:55:59 +0000

I use Google Mail (GMail) a lot. In the past, I’d hunt and peck with my mouse to read a new email and archive it, to move between folder and to tag items. When I learnt about keyboard shortcuts my life changed for the better.

To truly be productive with an app, you need to be able to navigate the app without your fingers leaving the keyboard. To this end we’ve introduced keyboard shortcuts.

keyboard shortcuts - click to enlarge

On the “Backlog and Planning” screen you can press “?” and bring up the help menu. The Story List now has a cursor, shown as a blue bar on the left of the first story. The cursor can be moved up (with “k”) and down (with “j”) and stories can be selected (with “x”). The bulk editing buttons up the top of the grid can be enabled with keystrokes too. You can quickly tag (with “t”) your stories, move them to an iteration (with “i”) and categorize them as a feature (with “f”). Search can be easily accessed (with “/”) as can new story composition (with “c”).

Not only have we added keyboard shortcuts, but we’ve also make it easier to navigate around the app with the TAB key. The focused elements highlight to give you a visual indicator of where you’re up to. It’s pretty nice.

At the moment, keyboard shortcuts are limited to the “Backlog and Planning” screen. We’ll expand their coverage over time.

We’d love you feedback.

Your workflow, your way for your agile project

Mark Mansour — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 21:30:14 +0000

We all have jobs to do. In agile project management we call these work items stories, bugs, chores (or technical tasks), epics, features and many other variations. Despite the range of work item names, they all locally fit into three states:

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?

Mark Mansour — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 15:02:33 +0000

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!

Importing and Exporting your data

Mark Mansour — 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.