Planning Board Revamp
The new planning boards have a completely refreshed layout and look and feel. They include a new visual design that moves the configuration settings to popup menus that are accessed from the toolbar, rather than cluttering up the top of the page. We have also added more clearly defined borders around the different row/column sections to make the different cells in the boards easier to distinguish. Finally, we have added simple numeric displays that quickly indicate how many cards are inside each row or column.
The board options popup lets you choose the view (product backlog, release backlog, or sprint backlog) as well as specify what is being used for the row or columns. If you choose a row that can have a parent value, you will also get the option to choose a grouping. For example, if you select Parent Requirement as the row, the grouping option will be by Component, and if you choose Person as the row, the grouping option will be by Team. You can also specify whether you want to show rows or columns that are used to contain items that do not match the row/column in question.
In the card features popup, you can configure what is displayed in the story cards themselves. By default, the cases are displayed in a minimalistic mode with just the name and type displayed. However, you can also display the requirement status, requirement description, and colored progress bars for the tasks and test cases, along with a display of their counts. Depending on the board view, it may also be possible to include incidents in the updated board.
For example, when we enable all of the card features, the board displayed above would now look like the following:
The requirements are displayed with their name, type, status, and description. The test coverage is shown along with a distinct colored circle for each test case (who's ID, name and description is displayed as a tooltip). The task progress is shown along with a distinct colored circle for each task (who's ID, name and description is displayed as a tooltip)
Finally, the new planning board uses the new administration options to specify which requirement statuses should be shown on the board and if so, what position they should be in. For our example, we are displaying just the statuses listed above in that specific order.
Next, we can discuss the three different distinct planning board views in more detail...
Product Backlog View
The product backlog view is designed to make it easy to see all of the unplanned items that need to be prioritized and "groomed" for inclusion into an upcoming release or sprint.
The view lets you slice and dice the unplanned items by various fields, including priority, component, status, and type. In the example screenshot above, we are displaying component vs. priority.
Release Backlog Views
The release backlog view lets you view all of the items for a specific release or, alternatively, for all planned items in all active releases.
In this example, we are displaying status vs. component for all active releases. When you select a specific release, you also have the option of displaying the requirements by parent epic, with the further option of grouping the parent epics by the product component.
In this view, you can see the grouping by component, as well as the individual rows and columns.
Sprint Backlog Views
Finally, the sprint backlog views let you plan either a specific sprint or all the active sprints in the current release (that must be selected for this view):
In this example above, we are filtering by release, displaying sprints as the columns, and not having any row category selected.
Task Board Revamp
The new planning board UI has also been used to update the task board in the same way. The task board lets you choose different values for the rows and columns, set a release, and also choose the fields to be displayed in the board.
The task board has many different views, let you slice and dice the development tasks in various ways. For example, below, we are simply displaying the task status as the columns.
We can also choose the option to group these tasks under the appropriate parent requirement - shown below:
When displaying the parent requirements associated with the tasks, you can expand a requirement to show the associated tasks right below:
Like their planning board cousin, the task board also sports different views of the tasks, together with the ability to link from the test cads to the requirements and tasks.
What's Next for the Boards?
Now that we are about to release the final version of the updated planning board and task board, the next step will be to roll out the same updated user interface (UI) to refresh/revamp the incidents board and the requirements board. Once that is done, we anticipate the new Scaled Agile capabilities in SpiraPlan will be updated to use the new boards on separate views for the product requirements and the program-wide capabilities and milestones.
Detailed Release Notes
- This release brings a brand new planning board. Streamlined and beautiful by default. Powerful customizations when you need them for columns, cards, and swimlanes (rows). This takes the beta board released earlier this year to the next level, thanks to the invaluable feedback from customers. The legacy board remains available to help users with the transition. (not available in SpiraTest)
- Like the planning board, the task board is all new, setting the beta board as the new default. The legacy task board currently remains available. (not available in SpiraTest)
- What requirement statuses show on the planning board can be tailored per product template. This feature was previously only available as a beta but is now always available (note that it only applies to the new planning board). (not available in SpiraTest)
(See SpiraDoc for the full release notes.)
Major Features
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Planning Board and Task Board (not available in SpiraTest)
- As a board user, I use the new planning and task boards by default, but can still access the equivalent legacy board if I need to [RQ:4649]
- As a task board user, I can change the board setting by dropdowns in a popup, to organize the board to meet my needs [RQ:4687]
- As a planning board user, I can change the board setting by dropdowns in a popup, to organize the board to meet my needs [RQ:4681]
- As a board user, I do not see the "All Items" banner header on the boards when no grouping is selected to simplify how I use the board [RQ:4683]
- As a board user, I do not see the "All items" row when no rows are selected on the boards to simplify how I use the board [RQ:4684]
- As a board user, I can easily view the planning boards by improving the spacing and layout of the headers for columns, rows, and groups so I can see more information in less space [RQ:4685]
- As a board user, I can see the number of cards in the column, row, and group headers of the planning board to make it easier to know what has data in it [RQ:4686]
- As a task board user, I can exclusively group by teams and only when rows is set to By Person to streamline how I can use the board [RQ:4652]
- As a planning board user, I can use grouping to sometimes improve specific use cases for how I organize the board to meet my needs [RQ:4651]
- As a planning board user, I can freely pick from any standard list field for either rows or columns, so I can organize the board to meet my needs [RQ:4650]
- As a board user, when I group by teams, I only see teams with people in them for the current product, so I do not see irrelevant information [RQ:4670]
- As a board user, I can easily expand and collapse rows and groups in a clear and understandable way to help me set up the board how I need [RQ:4672]
- As a board user, I do not see columns, rows, or groups for unassigned items by default to streamline and simplify how I use the board [RQ:4674]
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As a document user, I can associate a set of documents to any single artifact in my product from the document list page to make it quicker to add lots of documents to an artifact [RQ:4682]
Bug Fixes & Enhancements
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Board improvements
- Fix boards not sorting user names alphabetically when a release is provided [IN:8603]
- Fix showing duplicate cards on the beta planning board when moving from Release or Product backlog with no release set to the sprint backlog [IN:8602]
- Hide the "All Items" banner header on the boards when no grouping is selected to declutter and improve the user experience [IN:8521]
- Hide the "All items" row when no rows are selected on the boards to streamline the user experience [IN:8524]
- Improve the design of new boards when showing groups to make it clearer what group the user is currently focused on [IN:8507]
- Improve the feel of the new planning boards with clearer column and cell differentiation [IN:8539]
- Improve the usability of the boards when showing rows by making empty rows shorter [IN:8537]
- Improve the use of vertical space on the new planning boards by improving the spacing and layout of the headers for columns, rows, and groups [IN:8531]
- Make it clearer which row a user is looking at on the board by making the row name stick to the left when scrolling horizontally to the right [IN:8540]
- Make the boards work better when cells have many cards in them by limiting the maximum height of a cell [IN:8543]
- Make the planning board cards take up less vertical space while still being readable, particularly for the cards showing minimal extra information [IN:8546]
- Move the save, add and cancel buttons for the default product artifact boards on the artifact popups to make saving changes easier [IN:8562]
- Show the number of cards in the column, row, and group headers of the planning board to make it easier to know what has data in it [IN:8560]
- Simplify the planning board top toolbar by moving the dropdowns into a board settings popup [IN:8503]
- Simplify the task board top toolbar by moving the dropdowns into a board settings popup [IN:8504]
- Switch the current beta boards to be the primary board for those pages and the old main board the legacy board [IN:8381]
- When showing rows on the board, put row information as a new mini row header bar instead of in a dedicated column to preserve horizontal space and improve the user experience [IN:8522]
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Fix not being able to retrieve program milestones using the API, if there are no program milestone custom property definitions [IN:8627]
- Replace "k.A." with "N/A" in German in the N/A all testing setting to better align with test execution localization [IN:8672]
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 October 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.