VersionOne Product Blog

Quick! How Do I… Set Up & Start Using VersionOne Out-of-the-Box?

Victor Hernandez — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:45:39 +0000

VersionOne just works. Out-of-the-box. It allows for very specific configuration and customization, but when you just need to get-up-and-going, only a few things are needed to start planning and tracking your agile project. Here is a short guide on the essentials.

* Create Project in the Project Tree (Administration > Projects)

A Project in the Project Tree provides a place to capture a Backlog of Stories and Defects.
The Project can represent a Product, a Project, or a Release.

* Create a Sprint Schedule and assign to the Project (Administration > Projects > Sprint Schedules)

A Sprint Schedule is a collection of Sprints following the same duration, e.g., two-weeks.
Assign the Sprint Schedule to the Project to create, in essence, a Sprint calendar.

* Add Team Members to your Project (Administration > Members > Members)

Default Role is Team Member - this allows the member to create, edit, plan and track Stories and Defects.
Assign them to the Project (Administration > Members > Project Assignment).
This provides the Team Members access to the Project and its Backlog.

* Create or import Stories for the Project (Product Planning > Backlog)

Stories and/or Defects can be created in the Backlog tab of the Product Planning section or imported into the system via the Import tab – VersionOne provides a default Import Template that provides guidance on which fields can be immediately imported by default.
Stories and/or Defects can be estimated in a desired unit of estimation – e.g., Story Points; completion of this Estimate given to the Stories or Defects drives the Release Burndown chart to show progress being made against the Project Backlog.

* Create a Sprint(s) and assign Stories to it (Sprint Planning > Sprint Scheduling)

Create a Sprint(s) for the Project.
With the Project Backlog selected, drag-and-drop Stories from the Backlog into desired Sprint.
Stories can be broken down into Tasks and Tests and estimated in desired unit of detail estimation – e.g., Hours; this Detail Estimate provides a To Do value to each Task/Test; reducing the To Do value by a Team Member during the Sprint drives the Sprint Burndown chart to show progress being made against the Sprint Backlog.

* Track work and progress during the Sprint (Team Room)

Use the board views to track work during the Sprint; this is particularly valuable if used in the manner of a physical whiteboard – project onto a wall or display in a large monitor for the Team to use.
Drag-and-drop Stories, Tasks and Tests to a Status column to show progress; reduce number of To Do values to show progress.
Alternatively, use the My Home > My Work view independently to update assigned work.

The Quick Start Guide in our Community Site provides you with a walk-through of the setup process, as well as resources and tips on getting started. You’ll also find short videos on each area of the application; these can also be helpful in getting you up and running.

Don’t wait – start planning and tracking your agile project!

New Point Releases Available (11.3 – 13.1)

Steve Paro — Tue, 14 May 2013 01:53:41 +0000

Born in France in 1946, André René Roussimoff was a man who would forever change the lives of those who knew him. At 7 feet 4 inches tall and weighing in at 475 pounds, Roussimoff was known around the world as the wrestling superstar, André the Giant.

Despite the violent nature of his chosen profession, André was known by those who knew him outside the wrestling cage as someone whose compassion and generosity easily exceeded the scale of his otherwise intimidating size. As an example of his generosity, André was known for his insistence on always paying for his companion’s meals, and his refusal to allow others to pay for him, even when he was the guest. This trait was once discovered by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who after attempting to discreetly pay for André’s meal, found himself being physically carried from the restaurant by André and deposited on the roof of his car.

Another equally generous giant is our latest point release. While André’s gigantism was a result of Acromegaly, our point release is a giant because of the fact that it spans 7 releases and is chock full of new fixes and features.

And while our point release won’t insist on buying your lunch, even the Govenator would have a hard time arguing the generosity of the enhancements made to Conversations Usability; Ideas and Conversations email notifications; and Epic filter and Epic Timeline administration features.

Additionally, we’ve added in a new Hosted Support contact list feature, going all the way back to 11.3, so that we will know exactly who to contact any time we need to communicate with our customers regarding any planned outages or service disruptions.

On top of all this, we’ve included Datamart performance enhancements and several defect fixes — some going all the way to back to 11.3. The only thing that’s missing is the signature black wrestling singlet.

The full release notes for all the various affected versions can be found at http://community.versionone.com/Release%20Notes/Forms/ProductUpdates.aspx.

New Winter ’13 Point Release – Race Condition & Error Handling

Steve Paro — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:52:12 +0000

You say Tomato, I say Solanum Lycopersicum.

You say Potato, I say Solanum Tuberosum.

Before we hastily decide to call the whole thing off, how about a new point release to sort things out?

If nothing else, George and Ira Gershwin’s hit song for the 1937 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film “Shall We Dance” teaches us that words mean things. And while “Found in Version” and “Version Affected” don’t have the same lyrical quality of Gershwin’s tune, they are in fact the same thing.

So, in an effort to save you all from the heated debates that will surely arise from such an inconsistency, we’re happy to announce that today’s point release sets things right. Additionally, we’ve included a fix that addresses a previously unhandled race condition and we’ve improved the error handling during setup.

Check out the release notes for more information. http://community.versionone.com/Release%20Notes/R13.0.6ReleaseNotes.aspx

New Point Release – VersionOne Mall Map

Steve Paro — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 14:09:50 +0000

Born in Austria, in 1903, Victor David Gruen would later become a successful and famous American architect. Even if you’ve never before heard his name, chances are you’ve experienced his influence first-hand. You see, Victor David Gruen is widely considered to be the inventor of those sprawling pantheons to consumer excess and Cinnabun’s, the modern indoor shopping mall. And although later in life he rejected shopping malls as having “bastardized” his original ideas, we like to think that Gruen would have wholeheartedly approved of his influence on the starring feature in our newest point release.

Spawned from VersionOne’s most recent Hack Week and inspired by those big, colorful, “You Are Here” shopping mall directories, the Site Navigator is a visual navigation control that provides an alternate means of navigating and discovering the VersionOne application. While the Site Navigator (affectionately referred to as Mall Map) won’t tell you where the nearest Auntie Anne’s Pretzels is, it will give you an easy-to-read and intuitive visual map of the application. And unlike regular shopping mall directories, our Mall Map will learn your actual usage patterns and refine its display over time to provide you with a truly personalized navigation experience.

Sadly, as Gruen died in 1980, he won’t be able to tell us what he thinks of our latest feature. Fortunately for us though, you will. We’re very interested in learning what people think of our Site Navigator and we’d love to hear from you through the ‘Give Feedback’ function that is linked prominently from the page.

In addition to the Site Navigator, this point release also addresses an issue with Excel Export using IE8 found in versions 12.0 – 13.0. Link to full release notes can be found here: http://community.versionone.com/Release%20Notes/R13.0.5.ReleaseNotes.aspx

New Point Releases Available Winter ’12 through Winter ’13

Steve Paro — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:16:01 +0000

One of Aesop’s lesser known fables, titled “The papyrus and the crow,” tells the story of how an irreverent and callous, old bird tricked the Greek god Hermes into believing that Zeus was not really his true father. The crafty old crow accomplished this feat by subtly changing the text in several of Hermes’ papyrus scrolls. For many years, scholars assumed that Aesop was warning of placing too much faith in any one piece of writing; however in recent years the consensus among the more learned folks is that Aesop was really attempting to warn against the dangers of Cross Site Scripting and HTML injection in rich text controls.

Realizing that our customers definitely qualify as learned folks, we figured that we had better address this issue right away before customers started calling into support to inquire why we hadn’t taken heed to Aesop’s warnings. In addition to this issue, we also added several other core and datamart fixes for releases 12.0 through 13.0.

All the various release notes can be viewed here: http://community.versionone.com/Downloads/default.aspx

New Winter ’13 Point Release Available

Steve Paro — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 20:49:26 +0000

On February 19th back in 1777, the Continental Congress, in what could only be described as bold and surprising move, intentionally snubbed Brigadier General Benedict Arnold for promotion to Major General and instead opted to bestow the honor upon five of Arnold’s junior officers. The slight had enraged Arnold so much that later in 1780 he famously betrayed his country by attempting to hand over West Point to the British, setting him up to be forever known as one of the most famous traitors in American history. Years later when questioned further about the snub, then President George Washington confided that “It was Benedict Arnold’s inherent misunderstanding of WorkItem and Epic Cycle Time that was ultimately to blame for his failure to be promoted.”

So, in effort to better ensure that our customers won’t share a fate similar to Benedict Arnold, we proudly present several new Analytics Workitem and Epic Cycle-Time and Time-in-Status reports. With these new reports you will be able to truly understand and appreciate the amount of time in days that your epics and workitems are spending in their respective statuses as well as the cycle overall. Not only that, but through use of the new scatter plot reports, you’ll be able to better understand and identify outliers and process issues. In addition to these great features, we have also included in this point release several useful defect fixes.

Don’t make the same mistake as Benedict Arnold; read the release notes here: http://community.versionone.com/Release%20Notes/R13.0.3.ReleaseNotes.aspx

Using VersionOne for Earned Value Management (EVM) Reporting

Mark Kovacevich — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:58:36 +0000

There has been a lot written on the relationship between Earned Value Management (EVM) and Agile Development (See References below). There is now functionality in VersionOne Analytics (part of the VersionOne Ultimate Edition) to pull key Agile metrics that support EVM and output them in a report. This post goes through one such report. You can use the Custom Reporting module in Analytics to create variations on this example. Note that the information in the report can be exported to Excel, CSV, and/or PDF.

Assumptions used in building the Report:

All EVM information is at the Release level.
Dates, Budget (or Budget at Completion- BAC), and Total Estimate (Planned Release Story Points= PRSP) baselines will be established at the beginning of the Release and fixed as much as possible.
Percent Complete will be measured by comparing Open and Closed Story Points.
Expected Percent Complete will be measured by comparing days elapsed versus total days for the Release.
Costs will be computed using Effort. This might not work for all organizations as they might track this in a separate system.

Calculations in the Report:

Planned Value (PV) = Budget * Expected Percent Complete
Earned Value (EV) = Budget * Percent Complete
Actual Cost (AC) = Total Done * Constant ($145/ hour)
Cost Performance Index (CPI) = EV/ AC
Scheduling Performance Index (SPI) = EV/ PV
If Percent Complete is less than Expected Percent Complete, then the cell will be highlighted in Red.

The Resulting Report:

Again, this is just one way to approach this using VersionOne Analytics. This report can be customized to match the way your organization does EVM.

If you are interested in more information or a copy of the VersionOne Analytics Report Definition for this report, please contact me.

Here are a list of References on EVM and Agile:

This article by Tamara Sulaiman introduced the concept of Agile EVM: http://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-evm
There is another article by Tamara on Agile and EVM: http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=61
The VersionOne Community Site has an article on EVM Reporting and VersionOne: http://community.versionone.com/KnowledgeBase/FAQs/Q11423.aspx
This is a whitepaper on Making Agile Work in a Government Contracting Environment, which mentions EVM prominently: http://www.niwotridge.com/PDFs/ADC%20Final.pdf
This is an article on Agile and Earned Value Reporting: http://leadinganswers.typepad.com/leading_answers/files/agile_and_earned_value_reporting.pdf
Here’s a post on Agile Charts: http://www.agilekiwi.com/earnedvalue/agile-charts/

This is still an emerging area within Agile and Project Management.

Please share your comments and questions below. Thanks for reading!

New 12.3 Point Release Available

Steve Paro — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 20:02:47 +0000

On February 12, 1809 in Hodgenville Kentucky, America’s 16^th President Abraham Lincoln was born. It wasn’t until many years later in 1860, when speaking before a gathering of the Republican Party at the Cooper Union did Lincoln proclaim “TeamRoom Welcome overlays need only be displayed once per user, regardless of the number TeamRooms said user may create.”

So in honor of our great late President, and of that fateful day in history, we present the 12.3.7 point release. A release in which we now will only display the TeamRoom overlay once per user. A release in which exporting grids with certain customizations will not blow up, and a release in which custom reports will correctly return data when users are allowed to select a project name from a drop-down.

We have prepared release notes to commemorate this important day in history here: http://community.versionone.com/Release%20Notes/R12.3.7.ReleaseNotes.aspx

Notifications 101

Mohammed Khalid — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 20:43:08 +0000

I often get asked about the notification capabilities in VersionOne. Here are a couple of the questions I always get asked:

“Can my users get notifications within VersionOne?”

“Can my users get email notifications?”

“Subscriptions vs. Watch; what’s the difference?”

The answer to the first two questions is simply a ‘yes!’ VersionOne gives you an inbox within the application as well as an area to provide your SMTP settings to enable email notifications. The last question requires us to dive a little bit deeper. Taking a look and understanding each of them individually should provide a holistic view on the differences between the two.

Subscription:

This method allows users to subscribe to an event for the various assets in VersionOne. These assets include: Backlog Items, Defects, Feature Groups, Issues, Requests, Tasks, Tests and Test Sets. For each of these assets the user has many different events to which they can subscribe in order to receive notifications. Below is an example of a user subscribing to an event.

Andre is a Product Owner for the Call Center project for his organization’s VersionOne instance. Andre wants to know any time someone adds a new Backlog Item to the Call Center project. Andre can easily find out by creating a subscription. Andre is able to do this by navigating in the application following the steps below:

My Home > Subscriptions > Notification Types (grid) > Expand the desired asset (Backlog Item) > Subscribe on the event (Backlog Item Created)

The following image shows how Andre is able to set up this subscription for a specific project.

By creating a subscription, Andre will get notified any time a user creates a Backlog Item within that project.

Watch:

This method allows a user to watch a specific asset in VersionOne. These assets are: Backlog Items, Defects, Tasks, Tests and Test Sets. Let’s walk through an example of when a user would utilize Watch over subscribing to an event.

Danny is a developer for the Call Center project. Danny is currently in a sprint and needs to work on the Backlog Item “Update RMA.” Danny realizes that “Update RMA” is dependent on Backlog Item “Enter RMA,” which hasn’t yet been completed. Danny doesn’t need to get notified every time a Backlog Item is completed, so what should Danny do in this scenario?

Hmmm…. let me think…LOL! I’m sure you guessed that Danny needs to utilize the “Watch” action in VersionOne! Danny can simply find “Enter RMA” and select the “Watch Backlog Item” option.

Danny will receive a notification as soon as “Enter RMA” is completed letting him know that he can start work on the “Update RMA” Backlog Item.

So back to the original question: “Subscriptions vs. Watch: what’s the difference?”

Simply put, notifications for a specific event on an asset (i.e., any time a Backlog Item is created) vs. notification specifically for the selected asset (i.e., when a specified Backlog Item closes).

You’ve Never Seen Agile Development Like This

Andrea Keeble — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 13:19:59 +0000

This morning we rolled out our Winter 2013 product release, which is all about giving team members better ways to see their agile development projects. We’ve incorporated killer visualization enhancements into the release, which you can use to better understand potential impediments that cause bottlenecks across your projects and your teams.

Check out what’s new and let us know… have you ever seen agile development like this?

Release dependency diagrams
12+ new ALM integrations (see all VersionOne integrations here)
Additional relationship diagrams for Themes, Epics, Requests, Goals & Issues