TargetProcess selected as a finalist in 17th Annual Jolt Product Excellence Awards in Project Management category! In 2006 we won productivity award and finals two years in a row is definitely a good sign :)

With TP 2.2 release general project management and QA areas will be covered quite good in TargetProcess. Of course there are many, many things to improve and we will work on continuous improvements through iterations, however we have a new strategic goal — company wide operations support. In general there will be four areas that will be supported in TP 2.3 and TP 2.4:

1. Peoples management (in traditional PM science it is called Resources Management, but we don't want to use term 'resources' when working with people)
2. Integration needs (public Web Services API)
3. Programs management
4. Custom process needs (terminology support)

In TP 2.3 we will focus on first and second areas, while in TP 2.4 on third and fourth.

Peoples management

There are several questions that top managers (who are in charge for allocations) asks quite often:

• Who will be available for upcoming project?
• When developer A will be free for upcoming project?
• Who is overloaded?
• Who can be re-allocated without huge negative impact on project?

We hope that TargetProcess will provide answers on all these questions (or information that will be used to ask proper person). If you feel that you need something like that and have specific requirements, leave your comments.

Integration

Public API is a must-have for any life-cycle management system. There are so many third-party tools, in-house applications and data import/export needs. Such integration can't be done without public API.

TP 2.2 will be released Feb-5 and it will have a very good feature for better time tracking - weekly time sheet. It will be possible to add time for whole week or in the end of each day very fast. Time Sheet is fully ajax-based and has such nice features as keyboard navigation, fading effect on add/delete time events, automatic remaining time calculation.

Why we've implemented Time Sheet? In general time tracking is "hard-to-setup" practice, since developers do not like add spent time. Most common arguments are "It is waste of time", "I am spending 15 minutes per day to add time! It is more than an hour per week and half a day per month!" . So time addition should be as simple as possible. Time sheet in TargetProcess makes that really, really simple. It will take no more than 5 minutes to report spent time: one place, no reloads, no hassle.

We are finalizing TP 2.2 implementation and one feature is Test Cases Library. Test Cases library contains general test cases that can be reused in different projects. For example, login functionality is almost the same in all projects as well as login testing. So you may create several test cases for "login user" feature and save them in test case library. Then you may select test cases and copy them into another project. Quite useful stuff.

However, one problem is test cases categorization. You may have 1000+ test cases in library and it is not so simple to find required test cases to copy. There are several options:

1. Add Category property for test case and allow users to add/delete categories. Likely there will be QA lead who manage categories. So people will often ask him "please, add category XYZ".
2. Allow users to describe test cases in free form using tags (so-called folksonomy).

We've decided that solution 2 is more natural and flexible option.

The only problem with tags is that there will be lot of them. So you have to a) highlight tags with high rank and b) provide a way to filter tags. Tags highlighting with font size is a common and good way to show the most frequent tags, while filtering is less common feature. We've implemented tags filter this way. For example, user types "a" and sees only tags that starts on "a", user types "ag" and sees tags starts on "ag" and so on. It is just a lookup filter.

If tags concept will be proven for test cases library we are going to spread it on user stories, bugs and all important content in TargetProcess.

Now with test cases management, CSV import/export and batch actions.

Test Cases are much better in TP 2.1 in comparison with TP 1.7. Now it is possible to assign the same test case on several test plans, have complete run history, run the same test plan over different build or iterations. Test Runner provides more options like remember last test case, re-run some test cases, show full run stats. One planned feature is still missing, we will add test cases library in TP 2.2

CSV Import/Export and batch actions are just features for any serious web application. Nothing exciting but must have features in fact.

New features in TP 2.1:
http://www.targetprocess.com/tp21whatsnew.asp

Updated usage patterns:
http://www.targetprocess.com/usage_patterns/usage_patterns.asp