Fall 2015 Release Notes

VersionOne DevOps Center

The recent ClearCode Labs acquisition will bring all the continuous delivery & automation power into the VersionOne platform. The unified DevOps offering brings the complete feature set of the entire software delivery platform and in addition the VersionOne DevOps Center.

The VersionOne DevOps Center provides teams the ability to configure custom actions to be triggered within VersionOne workitems. Tasks such as setting up environments, building, deploying, testing, can now be triggered directly in VersionOne with a single click.

VersionOne DevOps and the DevOps Center are currently offered in limited release. If you are interested in participating in our early adopter program, please send us an email at devops-eap@versionone.com

Budgets

Budget capabilities have been enhanced in the Fall Release with the ability to set budgets by Strategic Themes, new visualizations to better understand the budget makeup and progress against it, and more flexibility in setting the budget.

• Strategic Themes budgets allow for simple high-level guidance across the relevant strategic themes for the selected budget project. Allocate the budget to any or all of the strategic themes and also follow how much work is being done outside the bounds of your strategic themes.

• New budget visualizations help you understand the amount of your budget that has been allocated, the relative allocation of your budget and actuals, and the progress of each budget allocation level. These visualizations display regardless of the method of budgeting you've selected.

• Create budgets using currencies or percentages. Budgeting by currency is great for matching up to financial budgets. Percentage budgets make for simple guidelines especially when the total expenditure is relatively consistent over time or when the total capacity remains unknown. 

Multi-Select Custom Fields

A new custom field type was added to support assigning multiple custom values to a custom attribute. The Multi-Select field type now allows tagging items with multiple values, as well as filtering for those values on grids and boards using the More Filters button.

Kanban Enhancements

Workitem Cycle Time by Status

Workitem Cycle Time by Status Report was updated to show cycle time by the following dimensions:

• Estimate

• Backlog Item Type (Story/Defect/TestSet)

• Priority

• Class Of Service

• Custom Dropdowns defined on Backlog Items.

My Dashboard Updates

The list of available panels on My Dashboard was updated to include two new panels:

• Workitem Cumulative Flow by Status

• Workitem Cycle Time

Both panels contain the same filtered options available to those charts in other location.  They also include a Project filter which allows you to lock-in a Project for the panel independent of the global Project selector.  Finally, you can add multiple instances of each panels and configure them independently. 

Additional Updates to the Core VersionOne Product

• Project Dashboard can be configured to aggregate estimate-based panels on on total estimate or workitem count.

• A user preference was added that allows users to default Workitem Count aggregation vs. Estimate aggregation on all applicable reports.

• Estimate-based charts on Scorecards honor the user preference for aggregation.

Kanban Updates to Analytics

• The following dashboard panels in Analytics now support item-count aggregation:

  • Agile Earned Value

  • Agile Earned Value By Date

  • Epic Burn Up

  • Epic Burn Up Monte Carlo Simulation

  • Epic Progress Report

  • Feature Completion

  • Project Burndown

  • Project Burndown Monte Carlo Simulation

  • Velocity Trend

  • Velocity Planned vs. Actual

  • Velocity By Date

  • Workitem Trend (This panel was previously called Estimate Trend)

Core Reporting Updates

Project Timeline

Have you enjoyed the Portfolio Item timeline and wanted the same thing for projects, program increments, or releases? After planning a release or program increment, would you like to know if the plan seems realistic? Are you tired of manually updating an external timeline? Have no fear, the new Project Timeline is here.

The Project Timeline lays out projects across a timeline to show when they begin, when they end and their current progress. Zoom out to see wider spans of time, scroll to look further into the past or history, filter to view a specific layer of your project tree, or click to see details. The timeline presents an interactive display that puts you in control and allows you to see past delivery and future plans. What's more, the timeline presents a unique roll-up graph that shows the organizations past delivery and future plans from a project perspective, allowing you to:

• ensure plans going forward are relatively smooth, and

• ensure future plans are reasonable in light of past delivery.

The Project Timeline is not a replacement for the Project/Program Summary report located in the Reports menu. That report is still available. 

Release Forecasting

The Release Forecasting report has been updated with a new chart that simultaneously shows forecasted end dates based on optimistic, pessimistic, and average velocity. These velocity values are calculated from the visible historical data. This chart also indicates the end date of the selected project so you can compare forecasted dates to the planned end date. In addition we added the ability to forecast end dates based on total estimate or workitem count. Finally, the Team filter now applies to the entire data-set giving you the ability to forecast for a team.  Not pictured, but soon to be available, is support for specifying the remaining estimate and manually entering a velocity value.

Other Additions:

• The Project Dashboard can be configured to aggregate estimate-based panels on on total estimate or workitem count.

• A user preference was added that enables Workitem Count aggregation on all reports by default.

• Estimate-based charts on Scorecards honor the preference for aggregation.

• An option was added to the following reports that allows you to include active workitems:

  • Velocity By Project

  • Velocity By Status

  • Velocity By Priority

  • Story/Backlog Item Velocity By Type

  • Story/Backlog Item Velocity By Risk

Fixed:

• The "Show Only Closed Defects" option on Defect Resolution Trend no longer reports an error

• Dashboard printing includes all information on the dashboard

• Test Trend includes the current date when the Weekly interval is selected.

• Reporting Category is considered when the Project Burndown chart is using Workitem Count aggregation

• Program Scorecard accurate calculates metrics

• Hovering on the Ideal line in burn-down and burn-up charts shows a value.

• Team Scorecard Cumulative Flow diagram is based on Workitem Count

• Project Burndown and Velocity Trend charts honor the unit label specified in Administration

• Current Member Load chart has an "All Projects" option

• Date entry is allowed on My Dashboard Panels

Data Mart

Multi-Select Custom Drop-downs

To facilitate reporting on the current values selected in a custom mulit-select dropdown, the ETL program creates a bridge table for each mulit-select custom drop-down defined in the core product.  The bridge table name is determined by concatenating the asset type (Issue, Story, Defect, PrimiaryWorkitem, etc) to the system name for the custom field.  Each bridge table has two columns: one for the identifier of the asset and another for the identifier of the list value.  Each row in this table represents 1 value relationship.

Workitem Broken By Defect

To facilitate reporting on Workitem currently Broken By Defects, the ETL program will create a Bridge table (Bridge.PrimaryWorkitemBrokenByDefect).  This table has two columns: One that containing the identifier of the Workitem (Story, Defect, TestSet) broken by the defect and one containing the identifier of the defect. Each row in this table represents one defect breaking a workitem.

Multi-Select Custom Dropdowns

To facilitate reporting on the current values selected in a custom mulit-select drop-down, the ETL program creates a bridge table for each mulit-select custom drop-down defined in the core product.  The bridge table name is determined by concatenating the asset type (issue, story, defect, primiary workitem, etc) to the system name for the custom field.  Each bridge table has two columns: one for the identifier of the asset and another for the identifier of the list value.  Each row in this table represents one value relationship.

Workitem Broken By Defect

To facilitate reporting on Workitem currently Broken By Defects, the ETL program will create a Bridge table (Bridge.PrimaryWorkitemBrokenByDefect). This table has two columns: One that containing the identifier of the Workitem (story, defect, testset) broken by the defect and one containing the identifier of the defect. Each row in this table represents one defect breaking a workitem.

Other Additions

To facilitate richer filtering and grouping on date details for Create Date and Last Modified Date, foreign key columns were added between dimension tables and the date dimension (Dim.Date).

Analytics

Main Menu Changes

The top level menu in Analytics has been expanded to facilitate focused reporting by organizational level.  The new Menu Items are

• Portfolio

• Program

• Team

Reporting at the Portfolio level is focused on tracking high-level business initiatives across multiple programs and/or organizations. Reporting at the Program, or Release, level is focused on tracking features across one or more products and/or releases. Reporting at the Team level is focused on tracking backlog progress of individual teams. 

The existing dashboards remain and are located under the new menu structure as follows:

• Team, Quality, and ScrumMaster Dashboards are located under the Team menu

• Product Owner Dashboard is located under the Program menu.

• Executive Dashboard is located under the Portfolio menu.

New Dashboards

As part of the new menu structure we added three three new dashboards; one for each level in the organization.  Unlike the existing dashboards, the new dashboards only require a Project and/or Program parameter at the Dashboard level.  Each panel available on the Dashboard contains panel specific filter and aggregation options.  Additionally, all panels on the new Dashboards can be added more than once.

New Backlog Item Grid

A new Analytic Grid was added that contains Stories, Defects and TestSets. Using this Grid you can charts, tables, and cross-tab tables that represent the entire backlog. 

Custom Reporting

You can now create Custom Reports to identify Workitems (Stories, Defects, and TestSets) that are currently broken by Defects and reports based on current values in multi-select fields.

Kanban Enhancemets

The following dashboard panels in Analytics now support item-count aggregation:

• Agile Earned Value

• Agile Earned Value By Date

• Epic Burn Up

• Epic Burn Up Monte Carlo Simulation

• Epic Progress Report

• Feature Completion

• Project Burndown

• Project Burndown Monte Carlo Simulation

• Velocity Trend

• Velocity Planned vs. Actual

• Velocity By Date

• Workitem Trend (This panel was previously called Estimate Trend)

Fixed:

• Portfolio item names on Portfolio Item Progress Report and Feature Completion are truncated to 30 characters. 

• Iteration Filter no longer includes deleted Iterations

TeamSync for Jira 1.1

TeamSync for JIRA now offers the following capabilities:

• Owner Sync: Portfolio Items owners in VersionOne now appear as JIRA assignee for issue type = "Epic". Additionally, issue assignees in JIRA for issue types "bug" and "story" are synched as "owners" for the corresponding VersionOne "story" and "defect".

• Effort Tracking: since owners are now fully synched, all effort logged in JIRA can now be viewed and reported on from VersionOne with the JIRA user who logged the worked for the releavant workitem.

• Priority Sync: TeamSync now allows users to map priorities from JIRA to VersionOne. Portfolio Item priority is synched from VersionOne to JIRA. Issue priority for "bug" and "story" in JIRA is now synched to VersionOne as "story" or "defect" priority.

• Improvements

  • Permission Validation: when using basic auth, TeamSync will validate the assigned user has the correct access level for the integration to operate correctly.

  • Log Messaging: has now been streamlined and will display more concise information.

  • Issue Links: Links to VersionOne are now included in the JIRA "Issue Links" section. Links will appear for bugs, stories, and epics (mapping to VersionOne defects, stories, and portfolio items)

Visit the TeamSync for JIRA page for more information.

Integration Updates

No other updates.

​Platform Updates

System Requirements Changes

• Added Windows 10 Support (via supported browsers only)

• Note that Microsoft Edge browser is not yet fully compatible with VersionOne. We recommend using Internet Explorer 11 for the time being.

To see the full list of requirements, see System Requirements.

Miscellaneous

• Most pages commonly used for data editing, such as Portfolio Tree and Backlog will now warn the user before leaving if there are unsaved changes on the page, minimizing the risk of inadvertently losing changes.

• When data is being edited on grids, boards and items, the Save and Cancel buttons are now "sticky" and do not scroll off, making it easier to see that there are unsaved changes and quicker to find the Save button to save changes.

• Items in grids that can be dragged and dropped now have grabber handles to visually indicate that ability.

• New styling has been applied to board views and various other locations in line with the UI updates made in the prior release.