August 15th, 2019 by Adam Sandman
As we get ready for the release of SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, and SpiraPlan 6.2 later this month, we'd like too introduce some of the new functionality that will be available in this release. In the second installment of this series, we're excited to announce the new agile planning enhancements that have been added to SpiraTeam and SpiraPlan 6.2. They are designed to make SpiraPlan even better as your first choice for planning and managing agile projects, whatever flavor of agile you are using.
New Scrum Task Board View
Based on feedback from our customers we have added a new display option to the SpiraTeam task board (which is found under the Tracking > Tasks menu). In addition to the options to group by Sprint, Priority, Person and Status, we have added the new option to group By Requirement. This option is only available when you are displaying the task board for a specific release or sprint.
In this case, the left hand side displays the requirements currently assigned to the current release / sprint, and the right hand column contains the tasks (in a card format) that are associated with that specific requirement, complete with color-coded progress bars. This view lets you quickly see all of the current user stories being worked, and the progress of completing the related tasks, in a single unified view.
This is great new view you can use for your morning standup meetings and Sprint reviews.
Story Card Order Numbering
Not to leave the main planning board feeling left out, based on feedback, we have added numerical rankings to the story cards on the main planning board views. The ranking numbers go from left to right and top-top bottom, and indicate the relative ordering and priority of the various story cards and defects. The ability to rearrange and groom the backlogs was always available using drag and drop, however the numerical makes this more explicit and works better during meetings or when the boards are printed out.
If you don't want to display the ranking numbers, simply deselect the Detailed View option and they will be hidden:
Story Points on the Release Details Page
The final enhancement to help teams working in agile projects is to add the Story Points as a new column on the Release details page in SpiraTeam. When you click on a specific release and display the Reqs & Tasks tab, it displays a consolidated list of the requirements and tasks assigned to the specific release or sprint. We now display the story point estimate (for requirements only) for each item in this grid.
The existing fields that display the task effort, progress and other values are unchanged.
How Do I Get The New Functionality?
For SpiraTeam and SpiraPlan customers, all you need to do is upgrade to v6.2 to get the new functionality. It will be available for cloud customers at the end of August and available for download customers around the same time.
If you have SpiraTest, you will need to upgrade to either SpiraTeam or SpiraPlan to get the new functionality.