We are extremely happy to announce the full Waterfall support in TargetProcess. No wonder it has the reputation of being the most flexible agile project management software on the market! New v.2.14 (special edition) will include features like:

Gantt Charts On All Levels

You will at least see nice and accurate Gantt charts in project, release and even iteration scope. Now you may define and manage Critical Path painlessly. Do you know your real iteration end date? With Critical Path you can predict it with 105% probability with minimal effort.

Extensive Dependencies Management

Dependencies management on tasks level is a really complex thing for any project. Now with TargetProcess you may pretty easy define all dependent tasks. Why stop there? TargetProcess is smart enough to generate potentially dependent tasks for you.

Waterfall Life-cycle Process Support

As you already know, TargetProcess has unique concept of Process. You may tune it to support your development process. Now it is possible with Waterfall as well! You may define all important project phases like Requirements, Design, Implementation, Verification, Maintenance.

Also you may enable such valuable practices as Big Design Up Front, Requirements Freeze and Fixed Budget. User interface adopted for the current project phase. For example, during Implementation phase you can't add defects and run test cases. During Requirements phase you can't commit code into repository. This forces development team to strictly follow Waterfall process which is definitely the very right road to the project success.

Micro-management Support

Micro-management is a very important thing in software development projects. You just can't spent time procrastinating or learning new technologies. Developers should focus on code only, every minute is important! Software development is hard and complex adaptive system in its core; you should do your best to complete project on time and under budget.

Now with TargetProcess you may estimate tasks down to minutes! That powers another extremely valuable metric – individual velocity. You can control everything and that is just great!

TargetProcess development teams hopes you'll enjoy new innovative functionality that we are providing with this special Waterfall-edition release. Please leave your comments!

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.

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

How are you using email at work? Right, you communicate with customers, colleagues, managers, etc. And if you are a project/product manager you communicate about projects most the time. How are you using TargetProcess or any other APM Tool? Right, to plan and track progress. Communication affects plans greatly. It affects iteration/release scope, requirements effort, priorities and many other things.

Now the idea is obvious: "There should be a way to have communication inside TargetProcess to see all related information immediately". No, we don't want to create our own communication channels or Chats or IM. But we can provide nicely integration with existing communication tools (voice is the hardest one, but still possible in the future :) I can imagine how you bind phone call or video record to user story named "As a user I want to create my kitchen design". So far we aren't looking for the complete solution, but just integrating emails with APM tool.

The typical usage patterns for email integration are:

• Customer sends an email with feature, problem or idea; you want to create user story, feature, request or bug right from email.
• You want to see all related information for specific feature. You often communicate via email, so it will be great to have all emails combined with related user story.

Email integration concept is very simple. You may receive all emails and have complete inbox inside TargetProcess. Then you may do any action with emails like bind email to user story, create user story from email, reply to email, etc.

The most exciting thing is automation. Agile Project Management tool may create user stories from emails and bind emails to user stories automatically. For example, if email subject contains user story name "Login page", obviously it should be attached to the user story "Login page". If email has subject "[User Story 345] Implementation thoughts" it should be attached to user story with ID 345.

However you may receive email with information about many user stories. This case is more complex and likely will require some manual handling.

Benefits

Benefits are just great. You will have complete trace of requirement discussions with all related information inside user story view. It will be easier to maintain Needs -> Requirements -> Implementation workflow which is a very, very important thing in software development and likely paramount for project success.

BTW, most CRM has an email integration and I can't imagine how you can use CRM without it.

Email Integration in TargetProcess

Basic email integration will be released in TargetProcess v.2.5 (July). Automatic rules and other interesting stuff will follow in next release.

We've started Help Desk implementation this week. It will spread two iterations. In the first iteration we will implement core Help Desk functionality like Add Request, View Requests List, Manage Requestors and Email Integration (TargetProcess will automatically retrieve email and convert some emails to requests). The second iteration will include advanced functionality like Help Desk Portal and Solutions.

Some very agile artifacts below :)