Winter 2016 Release Notes
Release Summary
Highlights Video
burgundyduck
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Enterprise Dashboard
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Kanban TeamRooms
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Timesheets
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CommitStream Updates
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TeamSync Updates
Feature Breakdown |
Lifecycle Team Edition |
Lifecycle Catalyst Edition |
Lifecycle Enterprise Edition |
Lifecycle Ultimate Edition |
Continuum |
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| Product Naming |  |
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| Continuum | |
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| Enterprise Dashboards | |
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| Program Board Visualization | |
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| Kanban TeamRooms | |
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| Timesheets | |
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| Core Reporting Updates | |
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| Data Mart | |
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| Analytics | |
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| Integration Updates | |
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| Platform Updates | |
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| System Requirements Changes | |
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| Miscellaneous | |
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How to Upgrade |
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On-demand (auto-upgrade)If your system is not in the auto-upgrade program, contact support to be added to the program or to schedule your upgrade. |
Jan 23 |
Jan 23 |
Jan 30 |
Jan 30 |
N/A |
On-siteContact support for your 2016 annual license. |
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If you are not a current customer, email us at info@versionone.com to get started. |
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Release Summary Video
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Get a quick tour of the major features of this release. The Release Summary video includes segments on:
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Product Naming
The recent acquisition means VersionOne now has two complementary products. Going forward, each product will have its own name.
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Lifecycle - Agile project and portfolio planning, tracking and reporting.
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Continuum - Continuous delivery automation, orchestration and visualization.
Continuum
Continuum is now generally available as a separate product to support DevOps Release automation and automation throughout the software delivery lifecycle. Continuum helps with automating, orchestrating and visualizing the flow of releases and their associated changes from inception to delivery.
Enterprise Level Dashboard in Analytics
Are you curious about how your organization is performing and if there is improvement? With the new Enterprise Dashboard in Analytics, you can now visualize organizational metrics in the following categories: Throughput, Responsiveness, Quality, and Predictability.
For each of these categories, there are panels that measure backlog items and panels that measure portfolio items. Each of those panels has parameters to specify how many years to look back and whether to report monthly or quarterly.
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Throughput is measured as the amount of work delivered or closed, per unit of time. For backlog items, each bar is grouped by backlog item type (story, defect, testset) and the legend can be used to disable/enable specific types. For portfolio Items, you can filter the results to a specific Portfolio Item type.
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Predictability is measured as the variation of Throughput. The more consistent your Throughput values are month-over-month, the predictable you are. Throughput variation is measured in 3 month and 6 month units.
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Responsiveness is measured as the amount of time backlog Items or portfolio items spend "In Progress". The lower the "In Progress" time, the more responsive you are. For each unit of time, the data point represents the average, mode, or median amount of time completed work spent "In Progress". The statistical calculation (median, mode, and average) is a panel parameter. These panels leverage the reporting categories introduced in the Summer 2015 release to determine which status values are considered "In Progress".
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Quality is measured as the total number of defects created compared to the total number of defects completed over time.
Program Board Visualization
You just spent days planning a SAFe Program Increment, or a Release, and you want to verify that the desired Features are planned and that dependencies have been identified and satisfied in a logical order. Well, now you have a visualization for that!
The VersionOne Program Board Visualization summarizes cross-team feature level dependencies through your iterations so you can identify and focus on the cross-team communications that will matter most. It enables you to see which Teams are delivering work for a given feature (Portfolio Item) and when that feature is planned to be delivered based on Backlog Items planned into Iterations. Additionally, it allows you see dependencies across Teams and features, identify when dependencies are being delivered out of order and highlight areas for communication between teams.
At a glance, you can determine:
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Which Portfolio Items have not been planned.
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What Teams are responsible for delivering Portfolio Item in the Program Increment/Release.
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Dependencies between Teams.
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Dependencies between Portfolio Items.
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Portfolio Items in the Program Increment/Release that have work planned into Iterations beyond the planned end date.
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Portfolio Items in the Program Increment/Release that have work in another Program Increment/Release.
In addition to being able to verify your planning session, this board can be used throughout the Program Increment/Release to track delivery progress.
The Program Board Visualization will have limited availability initially. If you are interested in participating, please contact programboards@versionone.com
Kanban Support in TeamRooms
Starting with this release, teams are no longer required to have an open sprint/iteration to use a TeamRoom. TeamRooms can now be configured as "Iterationless", which allows for all of the items that have any status set to immediately show up on the Kanban board. The Backlog panel then contains all the items without a set status. Dragging and dropping an item from the backlog onto the Kanban board sets the item status to the first column on the board, or the first step in the process.
When configured for Kanban, the top right area of the TeamRoom no longer contains the sprint velocity or the sprint burndown chart. Those metrics have been replaced with a more Kanban-oriented cumulative flow chart. In the future, we will be adding additional Kanban metrics to this area, such as Cycle time and Throughput.
Please note that the metrics in Kanban mode respect the user preference for showing reports by item count, instead of points, allowing for Kanban team to forego the estimates and still see relevant metrics.
Timesheets
The VersionOne Timesheet feature offers an intuitive way for the team members to enter their time in the environment they are already used to. By tracking your time in VersionOne, the tasks that you are working on are already entered and directly accessible.
The Timesheet page shows all of your time tracked against items for an entire week. You can use this view to verify and edit time entries one week at a time, as well as update the remaining hours (To Do). This is a live view and all of your changes are automatically saved.
Core Reporting Updates
Fixed
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The Sprint/Iteration Scorecard no longer times out when generating the Velocity Planned Vs. Actual Chart.
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Multiple charts on My Dashboard can now have the same title.
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Printing reports includes tabular data as well as chart.
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Portfolio Item Scorecards no longer truncate data when there are no workitems.
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The Project/Program Summary report properly renders project names containing the ampersand (&) character.
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The Velocity By Date report properly calculates intervals an no longer includes the Start Date.
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Dashboards properly export to PDF.
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The Standup Dashboard can be exported to PDF.
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My Dashboard properly exports to PDF when no panels are present.
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Deleting a published timeline no longer returns an error.
Data Mart
Added
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Upgrading the Data Mart ETL no longer forces a rebuild of the Data Mart database.
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Dim.PrimaryWorkitem now contains the Done Date attribute in the PrimaryWorkitemDoneDate column and a foreign key column to Dim.Date for this attribute called PrimaryWorkitemDoneDateKey. The Done Date value indicates the last date (most recent) the primary workitem moved into a status value assigned to the Completed Reporting Category.
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Dim.Epic now contains the Done Date attribute in the EpicDoneDate column and a foreign key column to Dim.Date for this attribute called EpicDoneDateKey. The Done Date value indicates the last date (most recent) the epic (portfolio item) moved into a status value assigned to the Completed Reporting Category.
Fixed
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The ETL queries used to populate calculated columns for Fact.Project and Fact.Epic were refactored to improve performance.
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The ETL queries used to populate Fact.PrimaryWorkitemDaysIn and Fact.EpicDaysIn we modified to stop counting DaysInStatus once an item is closed.
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The ETL populates Fact.EpicDaysIn using the same technique used to populate Fact.PrimaryWorkitemDaysIn. This change resulted in an entry in Fact.EpicDaysIn for all epics (portfolio items) and status value combinations.
Analytics
Fixed
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The tables used for the Primary Workitem Days In and the Portfolio Item Days In Data Sources in Custom Reporting accurately count the days spent in each status value.
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The Portfolio Item Days In Data Source in Custom Reporting is populated consistently with the Primary Workitem Days In Data Source. As a result, the Data Source contains a row for each portfolio item and status value combination.
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The Agile Earned Value Chart no longer includes deleted iterations in the selected schedule when the iteration count exceeds the number of planned iterations.
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The Effort Grid works when selecting a project with no end date.
Integration Updates
TeamSync for JIRA ver 1.2
The following new features are included with this version:
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Status Sync: TeamSync ver 1.2 now supports syncing statuses between JIRA and VersionOne. Simply map statuses on your configuration file and go.
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Defined "Start from" synchronization date: TeamSync now allows users to specify a "Start From" date in configuration. This will allow users to only sync workitems & activity from a certain date forward and ignore non-relevant history in long-running projects.
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Sync since last sync event only: this more efficient sync approach will only sync workitems that have changed since the last sync event; that is to say, only stories, bugs, and epics that have been either created or have changed since the last sync event will be synchronized.
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TeamSync 1.2 now support JIRA 7.
You can find more information in the communities page for TeamSync for JIRA.
Platform Updates
CommitStream
The following new features are included on the Winter Release:
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Show commits from child workitems: Users who commit their code at the task or test level, will now have the options to see those commits from the top-level workitem's sidepanel (i.e. story or defect). Simply tick the checkbox labeled "show children commits" and all commits for children tasks or tests will automaitcally show in the CommitStream sidepanel.
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Commit comment asset hyperlink: commit comments on CommitStream sidepanel will now offer a hyperlink to the specific workitem being mentioned. For example, a commit containing "S-01801" in its comment, will contain a hyperlink right on the workitem ID.
You can find more information in the communities page for CommitStream.
Sunset: OAuth Authentication
For the Winter 2016 release we are formally announcing our intent to sunset OAuth Authentication. Access Token authentication will be the preferred authentication method for our platform. Access Tokens provide a secure and streamlined approach for authenticating with the VersionOne API. They are more secure than Basic Authentication, yet much simpler to use than OAuth 2.0 Authentication. We ask customers who are using OAuth to please start planning to transition to Acces Token authentication. More information will be distributed in upcoming releases.
You can find more information on Access Token authentication here.
System Requirements Changes
- Clarified server vs. client OS's.
- Updated minimum client machine memory.
As of the Spring 2016 Release, VersionOne will drop support for Internet Explorer 9 and 10 in accordance with Microsoft's Internet Explorer support policies. This Winter '16 Release marks the last release in which IE 9 & 10 are supported.
To see the full list of requirements, see System Requirements.
Miscellaneous
Some feature and usability updates were made and rolled out in point releases, including:
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The Save and Cancel buttons on grid rows are sticky to scroll down as the grid scrolls.
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"Grippy" handles added to grid rows that are draggable.
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Various minor styling updates.
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Editing a budget.
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Filtering a budget by program.
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Publishing a project timeline.
Point Releases
For a complete listing of point releases, see Point Release Notes by Product.