Spotlight on Spira 6.10 - Agile Planning Board Enhancements

May 19th, 2021 by inflectra

agile planning board task board scrum kanban roadmap spotlight

The last release of Spira was instrumental in updating the new requirements document view, to improve the interactivity, configurability and add inline editing. Following on from these updates, we are planning some major updates to the various agile boards available in SpiraTeam and SpiraPlan. In our next release (6.10) we have focused on some of the 'low hanging fruit' and improved the display and usability of the boards, as well as added inline editing for the first time.

Inline Editing

In the previous version of the agile planning boards, you could view and add requirement, incident and task cards to the various boards in the system, but when you clicked on an item, it would always navigate you to the page for that item. This meant that editing the name, description or other fields of an item on the board was not as quick and easy as we would like.

With the planned enhancements in v6.10, you will be able to click on a requirement card in the planning board and be able to edit all the fields inline without changing page:

You will be able to edit any of the available fields, with the workflow rules enforced so that the appropriate fields are hidden, disabled or required, depending on the status the item is in:

In addition to editing the various fields, this new version will let you also quickly and easily add comments to the appropriate requirement, incident or task:

The new inline editing functionality is available for the Scrum task board, so that you can edit the tasks inline as well as add comments:

Similarly, for maintenance activities, the incident board will let you edit the various incidents inline, following the appropriate workflow rules and field configurations:

In all of the new agile board views, you still have the option of navigating to the full requirement, incident or task details page, by clicking on the 'edit full screen' item in the title bar:

Enhanced Tooltips & Card Display

In addition to the new inline editing capability, we have also improved the card display to include the initials of the user if an avatar has not been configured, and the tooltips now display additional, useful information such as the type, status, and path information:

Other Enhancements

In addition to these key enhancements, we have also made the following improvements:

The drag and dropping of cards has been made more accurate and consistent
The expanding and collapsing of cards (using the Expand/Collapse All) has been updated to improve performance
You can now print the boards using the standard web browser Print option, which renders the board in an easy to print style
You can now directly create requirements, task and incident cards directly into the different statuses in the Kanban view

Future Plans

This is only the beginning. We are planning several major updates to the planning boards in subsequent releases this year, including:

The ability to have the horizontal and vertical swim lanes available at the same time (e.g. have user stories ranked by epic against status)
More display and filtering options so that you can filter out unnecessary types of requirement, task, and incident
Support for grouping / viewing cards by teams and tracks as well as release, sprint, status and user
The ability to save the current filters, sorts, group by and display mode as a saved, shareable view