Lean-to is live! We haven’t done a great job of keeping the work we have been doing under wraps but we haven’t been promoting it either. Since we gave a demo of our agile project tracking application, Lean-to, at minnebar in May, we have been adding features and tweaking it until we were ready to start talking about it.
We wanted to let everyone know that we have pushed out some significant updates to Lean-to that we hope will get people excited. Here are a few of the highlights:
- Add people to your account and manage settings
- View plan and backlog views for your stories/bugs
- Track team progress with report views
- Get more info on list views with new context menus
- Add tests to stories in improved ways
- Assign stories or bugs to iterations from the backlog view
- Filter lists to show only those stories or bugs assigned to you
- More invite and project options
- Various interface improvements
We hope that you enjoy the new changes in this release and we ask that you don’t hesitate to use the feedback link to let us know what you like and don’t like about Lean-to. We’ve got lots more on our own backlog, but we’d love to hear what you want from Lean-to.
Add people to your account and manage settings
In addition to inviting others to share your projects, you can now add “official” users to your account. Unlike people you invite/share with, users have all the privileges that you do – adding/editing/deleting projects, adding and inviting new users, etc. To access these new features, just go to the Settings page (under your email address/username and the gear icon) and open the Account section. You’ll also notice that you can change your personal info on this same page, such as changing your password and adding a real name, which is used when taking (i.e. assigning to yourself) stories and bugs.
View plan and backlog views for your stories/bugs
We have changed the way your stories and bugs are organized. Just as before you can still get views of either stories or bugs, but if you are like us, you often like to see stories and bugs together in one list (by iteration). Well now you (and we) can. In the new Plan view you can see items that are already “on plan” because they have been assigned to an iteration. All those stories that are not yet assigned to an iteration can be found in the Backlog view. When you are on the backlog view you can simply drag your stories or bugs to an iteration and drop them into that iteration. Try it out, it’s fun.
Track team progress with report views
We have added a couple of ways to visualize your project’s progress and speed. In addition to some charts showing completed/incomplete stories and bugs, you can now view burn-up and velocity charts. A burn-up chart shows you your progress in completing Stories and Bugs with an estimated project completion target. The nice thing about a burn-up chart (as opposed to a burn-down chart) is that it makes it very easy to see the impact that requirements changes are having (because you can see added or removed stories or bugs very easily).
A new way of adding tests to stories
Now you can add multiple tests for a story. You can assign the tests to one of the following categories: Acceptance, Integration, Performance, Regression, Usability depending upon your needs.
Get more info on the list view with new context menus
Now you can get more information and options for any story or bug in the list views (without going to the detail page) by expanding the new context menus for that particular story/bug. Simply hover over the story or bug in the list and a little “tab arrow” icon will show up to the right of the row. Click the icon and the long description of the item will be displayed (and is editable when clicked) as well as the option to delete the item or go its detail view.
Assign stories or bugs to iterations from the backlog view
One of the nicest additions in this release is the ability to drag and drop Stories and Bugs from the Backlog view to assign them to an iteration. Not only can you drop them onto an existing iteration, but you can also create a brand new iteration from the Backlog view. We think this makes the Backlog view a lot more functional and more friendly to use. We even give you a count of the number of Stories/Bugs in the iteration as well as the total estimate for the iteration.
Filter lists to show only those stories or bugs assigned to you
If you take a look at the drop down menus under Plan and Backlog, you’ll notice a new option called “Mine” that will filter either of these views to just show the Stories or Bugs that are currently assigned to you.
More invite and project options
Be sure to check out the account settings page (under the gear icon) because we’ve added several new features there too.
The Projects section allows you to rename, archive, or delete your projects from a convenient central location. It will also show you any projects that you have joined through an invite and allow you to leave that project when desired.
The Invites section allows you to manage outstanding and accepted invites for your projects. This means that you can now remove shared access to a project, or even revoke an invite before it has been accepted.
Interface improvements
You may notice we moved a few things around and added a few touches here and there. The biggest improvement is the project options and selection box. This has always been in the upper right part of the screen but we have moved it from the sidebar up into the “cloud” where the Account settings link can be found. This change not only cleans up the sidebar area and allows for future feature inclusion there, but also more clearly designates the project-related functions as outside of the context of a specific project.
We’re ready for Firefox 3! In fact, Lean-to is optimized for our new favorite browser, which is both much faster and better at rendering XHTML and CSS than than its predecessor.
