Spira v7.12 Released: New Incident & Requirement Scrum/Kanban Boards

14-Feb-2024 by Inflectra Product News

We are pleased to announce the release of the latest version (v7.12) of our award-winning test management SpiraTest system, application lifecycle management SpiraTeam platform, and enterprise agile planning platform - SpiraPlan. This new version includes a completely redesigned incident tracking board that supports multiple views and adopts the new design we previously rolled out for the main planning board. In addition, we have updated the requirements board to match the new planning board and made some changes to the other boards based on feedback received from our customers.

New Incident Board

The new incident agile board uses the new design we introduced in Spira v7.9 for the main planning board. This new design lets you divide up the board into vertical columns, which can be any of the incident fields such as status, type, priority, severity, release or owner. The board will show the number of incident "cards" that are contained in each column at the top. The new board makes it easy to view the incidents and drag them between the different statuses as the work is completed. In addition, the board view is great during meetings where you want to be able to see the progress of the team at a glance:

One other major change is that you can now configure the order of the statuses as they appear on the board. This means the left-right ordering on the board can be aligned with your specific incident workflow for the first time, making it easier to visualize intuitively the flow of work on the project.

In the same way that the new planning board offers the ability to have horizontal rows or "swimlanes" as well as columns, the new incident board also has this feature. This allows you to segment the incidents by multiple fields at the same time. For example, in the view below, we are displaying the incident cards by priority and status. We have also changed the card settings to show the progress, and type and severity of the incident on the card:

You can easily change what information is displayed on each of the cards using the handy popup configuration dialog box:

Furthermore, when you choose certain incident fields as the row selection (e.g. person), you will get the additional option to group the rows into board groups. This is most commonly used when displaying the incidents by person, as you may have a large number of different team members working on the project. In this case, you can use the teams feature to group the people by project team:

In this example above, we have grouped the incidents by team, with the groups showing people as the rows and status as the columns. We have also added the incident status field on the card as an additional item.

Refreshed Requirements Board

In addition to the completely new incident board, we have also updated the requirements board to use the new design pioneered with the main planning board:

This brings the requirements views (hierarchy, grid, mind map and document) into alignment with the rest of the system.

Other Key Board Enhancements

Finally, one other enhancement that was requested by the beta testers of the new boards has been released as well, namely the ability to more clearly see the effort information associated with a release, sprint or person:

In the previous version this information was displayed in light grey that made it hard to read. Since some users had given the feedback that the effort information was too hidden, and others had same that it was not used and therefore added unnecessary clutter, we have now made it a configurable option:

So if you want to hide (or show) the effort information, it is now just a simple toggle switch on the configuration menu. For example, the previous screen would now look like the following if they were hidden:

We hope you enjoy the new requirement, task, incident and planning boards in Spira. The next boards to be updated will be the program-level boards that were originally introduced in Spira v5.1.

Bug Fixes & Enhancements

In addition to the major features listed above, the following bug fixes and minor enhancements were also included in this release:

  • Board improvements SpiraTeam SpiraPlan

    • Add option to the planning board to show or hide progress and efforts information in row and column headers (off by default) [IN:8963]
    • Add option to the task board to show or hide progress and efforts information in row and column headers (off by default) [IN:9100]
    • Allow users to move requirement cards when rows or columns is by status, and the status is completed [IN:9145]
    • Change how the boards update when updating their settings on the page to avoid edge cases where the wrong cards or duplicate cards may show (particularly on slower networks) [IN:8697]
    • Fix adding a new requirement on the planning board when rows is set to "By Parent" not having a parent requirement set [IN:8786]
    • Fix column counts on the planning board set to rows By Parent and groups By Component showing unassigned, in certain edge cases [IN:8787]
    • Fix duplicate cards showing if you change any card option or the unassigned toggle really quickly [IN:8716]
    • Fix not being able to set WIP limits for all requirement statuses [IN:8776]
    • Fix the planning board and task board letting users move cards when rows is set to status but the template does not allow status bulk editing [IN:8929]
    • Fix the task board not loading if the user is not able to view requirements [IN:8966]
    • Hide the "Other artifact cards to show" on the Planning Board Card Features popup if there are no artifacts to show [IN:8927]
    • Remove the legacy task board so users can only use the new and improved task board [IN:8958]
    • Remove the projected effort field from the incident popup on the incident board and on the planning board [IN:9130]

  • Other fixes and enhancements

    • Fix API calls that retrieve source code revisions / commits not sending the commit message [IN:9117] SpiraTeam SpiraPlan
    • Fix capability "Create Child" API endpoint not populating default values correctly (StatusId, TypeId, CreatorId) [IN:9029] SpiraPlan
    • Fix changes to custom properties not being saved when editing documents of type URL [IN:7710]
    • Fix product level custom reports containing PROJECT_GROUP_ID and ${ProjectId} in a single query not being able to be generated [IN:9099]
    • Fix the API to retrieve an associated test run [IN:9126]
    • Improve ease of understanding of a button toggled into an active state, especially while in dark mode [IN:8928]
    • Improve showing errors on user profile page, especially when trying to change a password [IN:9038]
    • Migrating a product between templates removes history IDs for system wide lookup fields such as requirement & release statuses [IN:9112]
    • Remove unnecessary debugging information when the installer runs for on premise customers [IN:9132]

How Do I Get the New Version?

Download customers can get the latest version right away by going to the secure Customer Area of our website. Cloud customers will have already been updated during the February maintenance window. If you have any questions about the new version, please contact support@inflectra.com. The full release notes can be found on SpiraDocs.