Today we've released v.2.11. It has some nice features and the major are:

Navigation flows
Already mentioned in previous post. It is a great help for novice users to become familiar with TargetProcess. Also it may works nicely as an alternative navigation.

Selenium and NUnit integration
Automated acceptance testing integration is a long awaited feature. Integration as usual implemented via plugins and it is really easy to add integration with any testing framework that may provide results in parseable format.

Getting Started area
Nothing to add. Contains useful information about TargetProcess usage.

Sample project generation
It is easier to learn the system when it has some real data. Now you may generate sample project and examine all reports, lists, etc.

Also with v.2.11 we are providing source code of all plugins under BSD license. You are free to modify and change them to fit your needs. They will be available for download next week.

More information about v.2.11

Short comparison of several agile project management tools. I can't resist to provide the quote :)

Even though it is [TargetProcess] a massive application somehow it feels very intuitive. Reports are easily customizable, processes can be changed to fit your style such as XP or SCRUM. You can comprehensively organize your stories into iterations by dragging and dropping. In-place editing almost everywhere allows for super quick updates. Overall the app seemed extremely configurable yet uncluttered. Also available is a public API, support for Subversion integration and a rich story card board that seems easier to use than Mingle’s.

One of the main goal of v.2.11 release was to simplify TargetProcess for new users. The main feature that targets the goal is Flows Panel.

You may select required flow and navigate the flow by clicking steps and execute the actions. TargetProcess shows available actions in popup and points to related element on the screen. System guides you through the flow and helps to understand panning and tracking process, quality management, requirements management, etc.

Also it works nicely as an alternative navigation. If you need to quickly plan release or iteration the flow is the fastest way to do that.

Most applications have static help. You click Help link, read the documentation and see pictures with nice flows. In TargetProcess we decided to replace this with live flows, that acts as help and as wizards simultaneously.

Today we held one more retrospective meeting. First we evaluated some action items from previous meeting:

Practice	Result
Daily Code Demos: Each developer must spend ~15-30 minutes every day demonstrating his code to other developer.	Development teem liked this practice and decided to keep it forever.
Coding Deadline: Two days before Iteration end all user stories that are not completed excluded from the iteration delivery and moved to the next iteration.	Not sure whether it helped. Team decided to keep this practice for one more iteration to try.
Define Iteration scope and specs before iteration start.	Good practice that allows to start iteration right away. Decided to keep it.

The major discussion topic on this meeting was the product quality. Sometimes testing is not started when required. For example, developer completes the feature on Monday, but testing starts on Thursday. The problem is in communication between development and testing teams. Two practices will be tried in the next iteration:

Developer/Tester team for user story. Each user story will have a pair of developer and tester. It will be known who is responsible for the user story testing and development and make it clear for all team members. It should help to discuss user story for interested parties.

Developer-to-QA demo. When developer completes the user story it should demonstrate the functionality to the tester right away. It will clearly identity the moment when implementation is done and help to identify initial most critical problems early. Also developer should demonstrate ready pieces of functionality during daily code demos (if he has something new to show).

We are finalizing help flows and Selenium integration. Help flows is a very nice feature that enables most common usage patterns. I'll post more about it later.

The screenshot below shows the daily progress for the iteration. Nice picture for Scrum Master :)