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!

Yesterday we've released TargetProcess v.2.13. The release is fully dedicated to Help Desk improvements.

In short, we've improved Help Desk user experience and made some actions easier. Some usage patterns:

Action	Old way	New way
Check for unprocessed requests	Navigate to requests list, sort by date. Then sort by last comment date. Filter out ideas to see just issues and questions.	Navigate to Issues Queue
Reply to typical request	Find similar request using search, navigate to it, find appropriate comment, copy this comment and add to the new request.	Click Attach Solution, select required solution.
Maintain conversation	Open request, try to find latest comment in the messy comments thread, edit comments to remove bad formatting and redundant information	Open request and read clean comments thread.

Product development is hard. You have hundreds of customers and thousands of requests. It is impossible to please them all. You may bury the product with blind requests implementation, it is not a news for anybody. You should maintain clear vision and balance like a rope-walker all the time.

During last 11 releases we added new functionality. There was maybe 1 release targeted to peformance and usability improvements, but most of the releases targeted new features: integration, customization, horizontal features, vertical features, etc. We decided to stop.

Next several releases will be dedicated to performance, usability and design improvements. Here is what we are going to do:

1. Unify design of the application and make it cool and attractive.
2. Provide outstanding functionality for lists manipulation. People spend much time with data in lists (filtering, editing, etc). All lists will be fully customizable. It will be possible to create a list with any filter, grouping, inner lists, etc. It will be possible to inline edit everything in all lists. All that will be based on ExtJS grid and as a client side solution it will be faster than everything else.
3. We have about a hundred of really nice requests/ideas/solutions from our customers regarding usability. We are going to implement most of them. Especially email notifications, personal customizability, lists manipulation, navigation, reporting.
4. Improve overall performance twice.

These are our goals for the next several releases. Maybe quite many of our customers will not be happy. They demand new features like Eclipse integration, CC.NET integration, extended time tracking, budgeting inside TargetProcess, etc. But great performance and superior usability will bring more benefits to all of them.

We are feeling that it is time to eliminate many medium and small problems in TargetProcess to be able to move it forward with greater success.

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

We do apologize for v.2.10 release delay. Many of you waiting for it. We have the last problem to fix - Automatic Installer on Vista. It is already fixed and passes the verification now. We hope the official release will be announced tomorrow. Also there was a question whether Tickets included into v.2.10. Yes, they included. What's new page will be updated soon.

TargetProcess v.2.7 released several days ago. It has three huge enhancements

• Custom Reports / Report Engine
• Program Level Release Planning
• Workflow per Process

We were targeting better data manipulation and program planning in the latest release. You are putting data into TargetProcess all the time and it is obvious that you want to extract it just as easily. Custom Reports Engine allows you to make custom queries, select columns, set sorting and grouping, add summary columns and build charts. It is a really powerful thing that you can use for reporting in ways we can’t even predict. Then you may export results into Excel and do with this data all that you want.

Program level release planning is just superb for high level view of the program progress and planning. The interface looks like a greatly simplified Gantt chart (no worries, it is not MS Project-like chart :) that shows all releases for all projects inside the program. Users may modify release dates, assign features and user stories to multiple releases from backlog and immediately see forecasted program release date – all in one screen. AJAX-based user interface brings desktop-like experience for product managers to plan releases. It is really fast and fancy.

You may check new features description at http://targetprocess.com/tp27whatsnew.asp.

We've released v.2.7 today. Official release will be ready next week, we are updating web site and there are some minor bugs to be fixed. New release includes some major features like Reports Engine, Workflow-per-Process, Program Level Release Planning as well as many small features like new rich editor, show all in lists (reverted back :), Perforce integration (experimental), tasks prioritization, default priority setting, search by custom fields and many more.

So far v.2.7 is available at public demo. Existing customers may request for upgrade right now or may wait till official release notification.

Marry Christmas!

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.

TargetProcess v.2.6 released today! We were targeting better user experience in the latest release. We took time to polish things and enhance the user interface by making it cleaner and easier to navigate. New iteration planning concept is just great, we are very excited about it! It visualizes the most important parameters of user stories and bugs such as effort and priority, thus providing real enjoyment during iteration planning sessions. You really feel user story effort and business value when making a decision about the assignment to iteration.

Inline editing in lists is an outstanding productivity feature. Double click on a row, change required info and simply hit Enter. No page reloads, no waiting! TargetProcess in many aspects is getting closer to usual desktop applications, which is far from reality in most of the web based apps out there.

There are many other smaller features that makes life easier like new filters, customizable inner lists, new chart, etc. We are continuing to improve TargetProcess usability to make it as easy to use as possible.

We are about to release TargetProcess v.2.6. It is quite large achievement for our team and a lot of effort. There were some major refactorings and significant performance improvements as well as many useful features.

• Visual Source Safe integration
• Inline editing in lists
• New Iteration Planning concept
• Customizable inner lists (for example, you may see all related Tasks, Bugs and Test Cases in User Stories list)
• Completely new Dashboard customization
• Many navigation and UI improvements
• Completely new internal licenses mechanism (you may control licenses via Customer Center)
• Completely new charts engine (flash-based, so charts are much more attractive now. I must say FusionCharts is a really good product, very easy to integrate and with a lot of customization potential)

More information will be available really soon. So far you may check new version at http://preview.targetprocess.com (admin / admin). Stay tuned!

Today we've released new version of TargetProcess. This release was SCRUM oriented and many things for better scrum support were added like customizable terminology, Task Board and impediments management. Now TargetProcess fits greatly for SCRUM dev. process and if you use SCRUM you should take a look at it.

The other goal was better reporting. Now you may generate various reports for several projects using simple UI.

As usual, this release contains many usability and productivity improvements. For example, you may select current iteration or release in drop downs with one click, finish iteration with two clicks and split user story with easy.

TargetProcess is available as On-Site or On-Demand version ($25 per user per month). We are receiving more and more very positive feedback from customers. So go ahead and try TP, you will be satisfied :)

So we are releasing TP 2.3 tomorrow. It was quite hard release for several reasons (we even increased release duration from 5 weeks to 6):

• We’ve started Selenium tests creation and it took time. Sure it will save a lot of time in future, but for this release it was additional burden since we created regression tests for old functionality as well as implemented some automation.
• Performance improvements took a lot of time. We’ve removed Ayende generics (major changes in overall architecture) and dramatically decrease CPU usage on server, so scalability improved greatly and TP can work with 100+ concurrent users without problems. I am really happy that we are using code generation, without it such changes in business layer should take several weeks instead several days.
• Many old bugs have been fixed.

If you take into consideration that new functionality still appeared (Web Services API and People Allocation Management) you will understand why the release was not easy. It is quite large achievement for us and TargetProcess becomes more and more enterprise-ready.

Two major additions in TP 2.3 are Web Services API and People Allocation Management. Both features are must have in any serious project management solution. Integration is a key for many companies and now public API enables almost any required integration. API is powerful and you may even create custom queries based on HQL syntax.

Effective people management in large departments is hard without good tool support. The common practice is to use Excel to control load and people availability. You understand that it is hard to maintain the document in actual state. The typical process is:

1. Ask all PMs about
   1. Who will be free and when
   2. Are there any staffing problem and who they need for the project?
2. Put the data from PMs to the spreadsheet(s).

Top manager usually does not have much time for manual updates and for large department it may take up to 2-3 hours to have complete actual data each week. TargetProcess eliminates this burden. The process is simple:

1. Each PM specify allocation for each person in the team as well as allocation end date
2. Each PM submit allocation requests if he needs more people
3. Top Managers just clicks Allocations link and see all the data on one screen. He may filter data, sort data, see details if required and resolve conflicts right there. Then he may click Allocation Requests link and see all requests for people (prioritized and commented).

So the only mandatory thing for PMs is to set correct allocation % and allocation end date for each team member. Not a hard task that will take just a few minutes.

In general TargetProcess became faster, more scalable, more powerful and open for integration in last release. Hope you will enjoy the results!