Here are shots of Task Boards for previous and current iterations. Nothing special with these boards: user stories on the left, tasks as stick notes, tasks statuses columns. Each developer has own color and this gives more personal visibility.

Iteration #12.3

Iteration #12.4

I was mistaken, we switched to one-week iterations several weeks ago and they worked much better than two-week iterations. We naturally feel the progress. User stories are smaller, development is highly focused, bug fixing is not a pain. One-week means five-days iteration in fact. The scheme is simple (day-by-day):

What benefits we have?

• Planning is terribly simple. You just get several user stories from backlog and ask each developer what user stories he will be able to complete during 3.5 days. Since time frame is short, it is quite easy to estimate a real possible effort.
• Progress Tracking is no-brainer. You even don't need burn down chart for 5 days. Task Board works just great and we found daily progress table especially useful for such small iterations.
• You have quite stable build every week. Something to show and demonstrate the real progress.

The main problem is organize QA. In most companies QA working with ready build when all development is completed, in agile environment and especially in one-week iterations environment it is not possible. QA have to test completed user stories in running iteration, that is a hard process. But this problem isn't a show stopper and so far so good.

Today we've completed third iteration of v.2.7. Report engine implementation going really well and right now it is possible to extract list of entities with

• defined columns (including related entities columns)
• set columns order
• defined filters (including related entities filters)

For example, you may extract all user stories with all columns like Name, Effort, Iteration Name, Feature Name where User Story Effort = 0 and User Story Feature Priority is Must Have.

It is required to add calculations to the reports engine as well as more flexible columns. In final release it will be possible to create let's say a report like that

ID	User Story Name	Test Cases Passed	Test Cases Failed	Total Test Cases	Open Bugs
12	Workflow per project	8	4	12	5
33	Custom field type (numeric)	4	0	4	0
45	Average column	3	0	3	2

Development of Program Releases Management is in progress as well. In this iteration we've added product backlog to release plan with sorting and filtering options. There are some things to do in next iteration like drag and drop planning, release date forecasting and some smaller things.

Also we've integrated Selenium tests with Cruise Control and at least we have good build process setup :)

We are continuing development of v.2.7. It will contain such things as program level release planning and custom reporting. Also we are re-styling user interface. You may check progress at preview.targetprocess.com (admin / admin)

Program level release planning will resolve many problems of large projects. It will provide full view on all projects releases and will allow to synchronize releases and re-plan them. Also it will show planned and forecasted product release dates.

Planning will work via drag and drop. We think that this feature will be great for product planning and high level progress tracking.