New Release of Scrum Tool Agilo 1.3

25 May 2010 mhaecker

We are proud to announce the release of Agilo Pro 1.3 and Agilo Open 0.9. During the last months, we have worked hard and implemented many new features in the Backlog and the whiteboard. We wanted to release sooner, but since we also wanted to remove the old Backlog view for this release, many issues had to be ironed out.

Martin Häcker
I'm a developer working for Agile42 to bring Agilo to the next level.

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25 May 2010

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New Release of Agilo.

We are proud to announce the release of Agilo Pro 1.3 and Agilo Open 0.9. During the last months, we have worked hard and implemented many new features in the Backlog and the whiteboard. We wanted to release sooner, but since we also wanted to remove the old Backlog view for this release, many issues had to be ironed out.

Note to the impatient: Be sure not to miss our gorgeous 'How to Update' section further down!

Enjoy!

New Features

High Resolution Historic Burndown

The burndown chart will now correctly document the increase or decrease of remaining time throughout the sprint, even if you add or remove tickets in the middle of the sprint. A higher data resolution now increases accuracy, so you gain hourly data points for your burndown charts.

See it in full quality on YouTube

Better Visibility for Sudden Changes in Burndown Chart

If you add or remove a story with its tasks from a sprint, the burndown chart will now show a vertical rise or fall for the remaining time the tasks for that story added or removed. This allows you to clearly distinguish from normal, but steep, burndown and the extraordinary event of removing a story from a sprint.

See it in full quality on YouTube

Show Only Working Days in Burndown

The burndown chart can now optionally hide weekends and other days with no capacity, such as bank holidays.

You can enable it in the configuration file with the option burndown_should_show_working_days_only = True in the section [agilo-general]. This will hide all days without capacity from the burndown chart. Please note however that this only works reliably if all team members are in the same time zone. (The time zone can be set in each user's preferences, accessible from the upper right toolbar of each logged in user).

See it in full quality on YouTube

Enhanced Inline Editor (Pro)

The ticket inline editor allows you to edit all ticket fields in one dialog directly in the Backlog. It now shows you what you are editing, including the type of the ticket, has a new loading indicator allows resizing of text areas in browsers that support this.

Move Tasks with their Story

Usually User Stories in Agilo are connected to tasks and vice versa. If you now change the sprint of a story, all its open tasks that have also the same sprint set will move with it. This is especially useful if you want to move already broken down stories into, out of, or in between sprints. (Implies also to other "items", eg. requirements and user stories)

See it in full quality on YouTube

All Ticket Fields are Editable in the Backlog

All fields of all tickets are now editable (configuration option removed), even custom fields and summary. When you click on the value you want to change, Agilo will show an input field where you can enter the new value without going to a different page. Clicking another field or pressing enter will immediately store the change on the server. Hitting escape will cancel the edit.

Filtered Hierarchical Backlog and Whiteboard

The Backlog and the Whiteboard (Pro) can be filtered by arbitrary ticket properties. The property to filter by can be specified via the setting backlog_filter_attribute. Both the Backlog and Whiteboard now respect the hierarchy of tickets when filtering. For example, if you set backlog_filter_attribute = component to enable filtering by components, all parent tickets (stories, requirements) of something that is selected by that filter will be shown - even if the parent doesn't have that component set.

This works on the Backlog

and the Whiteboard

See it in full quality on YouTube

Hide Closed Tickets in the Backlog and the Whiteboard

The Backlog and the Whiteboard can now hide all tickets that are closed with a single click. Of course this filter too respects the hierarchy of tickets.

User Specific Tickets

The Backlog and the Whiteboard can now limit display to tickets the user is involved in. Guess what? This also respects the ticket hierarchy.

Linking Tickets to Multiple Parents

Sometimes you might want to link a story to multiple requirements or a task to multiple stories to document what it helps to achieve. In the new version, Agilo will actually display this ticket with each parent so you can easily see all references to it.

The arrow marker in front of the ticket summary shows that multiple copies of this item are being rendered. Editing any them will instantly update all others.

Improved Contingents Handling in the Backlog

Some Scrum teams need to perform unplannable tasks during their sprints (like supporting end users or fixing critical bugs). These teams can set aside some time ("contingent") for these activities to limit the uncertainty. The ScrumMaster can now create these contingents for the team per sprint using the plus button in the bottom toolbar of the contingent view. The contingent view can be reached via the battery icon in the Backlog toolbar.

During the sprint, each team member can add or remove time from the contingent (for example if they accidentally added too much time to it).

Confirm Commitment

In Scrum the team confirms the commitment to document what they think they can achieve in the a sprint. Now you can do this directly from the Backlog toolbar. We also added a new permission AGILO_CONFIRM_COMMITMENT to enable this, which the ScrumMaster has by default.

See it in full quality on YouTube

Background Updating of the Backlog

When editing the Backlog, it will load any changes to the Backlog that happened and update its display to show them. This means that all tickets added by someone else will show up, as will any changes that happen to other tickets as a consequence of editing one ticket (e.g. story removal).

See it in full quality on YouTube

Bugfix: Custom Top Level Types in Backlog

The Backlog can now display custom top level types besides User Story, Requirements and Bugs. However the type still needs to have a relation to a child type (like task) to be shown.

Backlog Strictness Changes:

You cannot configure the backlog to be strict (include only tickets scheduled in that scope) or non-strict (show all tickets) anymore. Instead all Backlogs with global scope (e.g. the Product Backlog) is now always strict and all other backlogs are now always non-strict.

This means that when you schedule a story for a milestone or sprint, it will not be shown anymore in the product backlog.

How to Update

• Download the new version from the tools page and unpack the zip file so you have a binary_agilo-<version-number>_PRO-py<your python version>.egg file.
• Create a backup of your Agilo environment folder and your database (if you use sqlite, the database is just a file in your environment).
• Install the new version of Agilo: easy_install binary_agilo-... (you might want to do that with the sudo command on Linux)
• Upgrade your database: trac-admin <path to Agilo environment> upgrade

More information about upgrading can be found in our upgrade guide

Caveats

• If you upgrade while a sprint is running, your burndown chart for this sprint might look wrong as Agilo doesn't know the exact time when the commitment was confirmed.

• The sprint Backlog does not yet expose a GUI to download its content as a CSV-file. It is however still accessible. To download, append '?format=csv' to the backlog-url. (or &format=csv if there already is another ? in the url)

• The Backlog does not yet show the status of tickets. You can however add the ticket-status column to the Backlog to see the status of tickets. As a Trac Admin go to Admin > Backlogs > Sprint Backlog and click 'Show' in the 'Status' column. All tickets also have two css classes ticketstatus- and tickettype-. To use them just add a custom-css file to your trac (for details see tracks documentation on interface customization)

• Please note that this release is not compatible to Trac 0.12 and Genshi 0.6. Please make sure you remove them prior to installing Agilo (or you will get error messages doing so :)