What's New – Agile Manager 2.43

The following features were introduced or enhanced in Agile Manager 2.43:

• Customize workspace fields (workspace administrators)
• Customize and track your feature life cycle
• Plan and track themes (align with Scaled Agile Framework® guidelines)
• Synchronizing with ALM

See also: What was new in previous releases

Customize workspace fields (workspace administrators)

New Fields tab in the Workspace configuration settings:

Workspace administrators can now define custom and required fields for their workspaces. These fields can be defined in addition to those defined for all workspaces by site administrators.

You can define up to 12 custom fields for each entity type (defects, user stories, themes, and so on). This number includes both site and workspace fields.

A site administrator can divide this quota between the site and workspace levels. This configuration is done separately for different entity types:

For details, see Manage custom fields.

Customize and track your feature life cycle

Customize your feature life cycle

Use the new Statuses tab in the Workspace configuration settings:

Define up to 20 values to use in the Feature Status field, specify the value to use by default when creating a new feature, and decide the order of the statuses.

For each status, define:

• Work in Progress (WIP) limit. The number of features that can be in a feature status at the same time.

• Time limit. The number of days a feature can stay in this status.

  The Feature Board displays alerts when these limits are exceeded.

  Note: The amount of time a feature stays in a status is measured from the moment it enters the status. This information is available only if a feature's status changed after the Feature Board was introduced (December 2015).

• Color. The color used to represent the feature status on the Feature Board.

• Exit criteria. A list of conditions that should be met before a user can move a feature out of this status.

  Example:  

  Define the exit criteria for the New status as follows:

  • An initial estimate is set.
  • A priority has been set (Business Value, Cost of Delay, or WSJF score).
  • Story points have been estimated.

  When users wants to change the feature status from New to Defined, they first ensure that all items in this list have been handled.

  Note: Agile Manager does not automatically advance features from one status to the next when the exit criteria are met.

  For more details, see Configure feature workflow.

Use the new interactive Feature Board to track your feature life cycle

Manage the flow features through their development stages and across releases with an interactive feature board.

In the image below, the cards are colored by Owner, the board's rows (swim lanes) represent releases, and we collapsed some board columns to enable Agile Manager to display more detail on each card.

• Customize the feature board to match your work process. Define feature statuses, including their order, colors, WIP limits, Time limits, and exit criteria. These definitions affect the columns of the feature board.

• Set the swim lanes for the board. Select whether to arrange the feature cards in swim lanes according to Owner, Feature Type, Theme, or Release.

• Set the colors on the cards. Select whether to color the feature cards by Owner, Feature Type, Theme, or Release.

• Collapse columns to view more detail on the cards. The level of detail displayed on each feature card depends on the size of the card and the width of the columns in the board.

  Depending on the card size, you might see the feature's name, owner, release, progress bar, ID, number of aggregated BLI story points, and WSJF score.

• Manage features on the feature board.

  • Drag cards from column to column, while keeping within the WIP and time limits, to track their progress. The feature board displays alerts if you exceed the limits.

  • Drag cards from swim lane to swim lane to assign values to the relevant field.

    Example: If you are using the Release field for swim lanes, assign a feature to a release by dragging it to the relevant swim lane. The Feature Planning dialog box opens to enable you to complete the release assignment.

  • To change a feature's owner: Click the owner name, if displayed on the card, and select a different one from the list.

  • To open a feature's Details view: Click the feature ID or name link displayed on the card.

  • Right click on the card to access additional actions, such as planning or splitting the feature.

    

For more details, see Use the Feature Board.

Plan and track themes (align with Scaled Agile Framework® guidelines)

New fields in the Theme entity enable you to plan and track your themes in more detail, as you can for features. These fields are also available in the theme resource in the Agile Manager API.

• Initial Estimate (in shirt sizes)

• Theme Story Points

• Theme Owner

• Theme Type (Architectural or Business)

• WSJF fields

The Themes grid now displays Aggregated Feature Story Points and Aggregated BLI Story Points per theme.

For more details, see Plan and track themes.

Synchronizing with ALM

NextGen Synchronizer supports the fields and features added in this release: Custom workspace fields, new theme fields, feature statuses.

NextGen Synchronizer now synchronizes user field values even if the user is not included in the Agile Manager user list.

If you are still using ALM Synchronizer, we recommend that you migrate your synchronization links to NextGen Synchronizer.

Existing ALM Synchronizer deployments will continue to be supported, but ALM Synchronizer is no longer offered for installation, and fields introduced or modified in Agile Manager 2.43 and later may not be synchronized. This includes the feature status field, workspace custom fields, theme story points, theme owner, and more.

What was new in previous releases

What's New – Agile Manager 2.42

What's New – Agile Manager 2.41

What's New – Agile Manager 2.40

For details about earlier releases of Agile Manager, see Previous Agile Manager release notes and our Release Notes user forum.