Acunote

Acunote Now Available on the Google Apps Marketplace

Today we are proud to announce that Acunote is now available on the Google Apps Marketplace™, Google's online storefront for Google Apps™ products and services.

One of the Acunote's major strengths has always been the tight integration with existing company's processes and tools. By adding Acunote to the Google Apps Marketplace, we've made it possible for Google Apps customers to organically integrate the project management system with their messaging and collaboration platform.

Google Apps Integration

Acunote provides two Google Apps integration features:

• Single sign-on with your Google Apps account
• Universal navigation with access to Acunote from GMail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and other Google Apps
  
  

How to Add Acunote to Google Apps?

Click on the button below to add Acunote to Google Apps (you must have admin privileges).

You just need to specify your Google Apps domain and new Acunote organization account for that domain will be automatically created for you.

How Single Sign-on Works?

On first login the user account will be created automatically. It will have the same email, username, first and last name as in Google Apps. Acunote will not store a password, instead it will authenticate users with their Google Apps login credentials through Google OpenID protocol.

Account owner will be notified by email about each new Acunote user account creation. Also, note that Acunote accounts created from Google Apps are subscribed to the Free plan which has 5 users limit. You will have to upgrade to one of the paid plans starting from $49/month to be able to create more users.

I Already Have Acunote Account. How Do I Use Google Apps Integration?

At this moment Acunote for Google Apps is provided only for new customers. We're working on making this integration available for existing Acunote customers in a short time.

If you are existing Acunote customer and would like to beta-test the integration, please write to support at acunote dot com and we might be able to give you early access to the integration before it's released.

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Google, Google Apps Marketplace, Google Apps, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Video are trademarks of Google Inc.

New Features: Improved Burndown Charts

About one month ago, we released what is probably the largest change to Acunote burndown charts since their inception. User feedback has been mostly positive, though some users had questions about interpretation of the new Area Burndown charts.  We will discuss Area Burndowns in detail later in this post.  Here is a summary of the recent enhancements to Acunote burndown charts:

New Look

We refreshed the look of our burndown charts. In general, they have just become a lot nicer. Important changes are the new color scheme with easily distinguishable colors and better y-axis scaling. Large teams and organizations will appreciate that legends will no longer grow infinitely and cover your chart. Magnified versions of the chart will show the legend to the right of the drawing area, displaying up to 30 usernames in the legend.

New Prediction

The team burndown chart will use the new prediction algorithm to predict how much work the team will get done in the future. This prediction is displayed as a dashed line that starts from today and spans until the end of the sprint. 

Prediction Burndown Chart

This prediction replaces the approximation line we showed before.

New Area Burndown

We replaced two of our additional burndown types (the ones called alternative and incremental) with the new "Area Burndown". Both alternative and incremental burndowns were used to see the changes in the amount of work planned for a sprint. But they had their share of problems. For example, differential burndown didn't allow for predictions and incremental burndown was unreadable for large teams.

Area burndown displays the work amount (just like the old incremental burndown) and draws stacked areas that represent the work remaining for the team or for each user (in case of multi-user burndown). Such chart makes it easy to see not only how the work amount changes during a sprint, but at which rate the work is being completed.

Area Burndown Chart

Line burndowns are useful for predictions, but they don't show you information about when work is added in the middle of a sprint. To visually get this information you can use Area Burndowns. Area Burndowns are designed to show added work by increasing the distance between the work remaining line and the horizontal axis (called the "baseline"). Each time a new task is added at the middle of a sprint, the baseline goes down by the estimate of that task.

With that technique the upper line of the Area Burndown chart looks exactly the same as a one line burndown thus allowing for predictions. At the same time, the descending baseline in the Area Burndown indicates work added to the sprint in progress.

Line Burndown                                                   Area Burndown

 

The table below illustrates how the Area Burndown chart above is calculated:

	Start	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
Task 1 (10h estimate)	10	8	8	4	1	0
Task 2 (10h estimate)				8	6	2
Sum of Work Remaining, S	10	8	8	12	7	2
Baseline, B	10	10	10	0	0	0
Work Remaining (inc.), S+B	20	18	18	12	7	2

Since the amount of work can't be negative we show the whole chart above the zero line. 

User Burndown Filtering

"My work remaining" chart has been replaced by the more flexible "User Burndown". By default it shows your burndown like the old chart did. But it is possible now to see a single burndown for any other user. Just filter the tasklist for a user and the burndown will be refreshed with that user's chart.

Single User Burndown                                        Multi-User Burndown

New Terminology

As you may have noticed already, we changed our terminology a bit. The word "Burndown" is used everywhere instead of "Work Remaining" and burndowns are classified by their chart type - Line or Area. The table below summarizes all changes:

Old Name	New Name
Individual Work Remaining	Multiuser Line Burndown
User's Work Remaining	User Line Burndown
Team Work Remaining	Team Line Burndown
Individual Work Remaining (alternative)	N/A (removed)
User's Work Remaining (alternative)	N/A (removed)
Team Work Remaining (alternative)	N/A (removed)
Individual Work Remaining (incremental)	Multiuser Area Burndown
User's Work Remaining (incremental)	User Area Burndown
Team Work Remaining (incremental)	Team Area Burndown

What do you think of these burndown charts?

We hope you find these new and improved burndown charts help you and your team to become more Agile.  Here at Acunote, where we all eat our own cooking and drink from the proverbial kool-aid fountain, we have become quite avid fans of the new burndown charts, so we are pleased to finally share them with you.  Let us know what you think of these new charts.

New Feature: Advanced Search Form

In our last blog post, we highlighted some of the new search syntax requested by users and now available in Acunote.  Other users have also asked for a form to build queries, so we delivered that as well!  

We've added an Advanced Search Form to allow for creating reasonably complex search queries through a GUI interface. Take a look:

 

To access the Advanced Search Form go to the Issues tab in Acunote and click on the Advanced Search link below the search query box.

New Features: Enhancements to Acunote Search Syntax

We're catching up on some feature announcements here on the Acunote blog.  For users who regularly view announcements in Acunote, this may not be new information, but it's probably worthwhile to review in any case, as these search enhancements enable some powerful advanced queries.  Specific enhancements as follows:

Search Expression Grouping With Parentheses

Acunote search language now lets you group search expressions in parentheses to define the precedence of search operations.  For example, the following query will return tasks that are in both sprints Foo and Bar, or task with owner Joe:

 (sprint:foo AND sprint:bar) OR owner:Joe

Nested expressions in parentheses are also supported by the search language.  To search for names that include parentheses, quote the search term, for example:

 sprint: "foo(bar)"

It is also possible to negate the grouped expression, for example:

 -(sprint:foo AND sprint:bar)

Important Task Search Language Changes

Additions to the search language:

New Syntax	Explanation
createdbefore: createdafter: updatedbefore: updatedafter:	Search for tasks created/updated before/after given date
watcher: none estimate: none remaining: none	Search for tasks that have no estimate, remaining or watcher
has: <property>	Search for tasks that have given property. Available properties are: tag, comment, attachment, parent, child
is: <property>	Search for tasks that are: deleted, parent, child

Following search language syntax is no longer supported and the new syntax should be used instead:

Old syntax	New syntax	Explanation
priority: 1	priority: P1	Priorities without "P" prefix are no longer supported
priority: 0..5	priority: P0..P5	Priorities without "P" prefix are no longer supported
in_sprint: foo	sprint: foo	Changed for consistency with "project:" syntax
owner: "Not Assigned"	owner: none	Changed for consistency with other queries for empty values
status: "Not Started"	status: Not Started	Quoting is not necessary for status names anymore
parent_of: none	-is: parent -has: child	"parent_of:" query type is no longer supported
child_of: none	-has: parent	"child_of:" query type is no longer supported
deleted: yes	is: deleted	"deleted: yes" query type is no longer supported

Following search language syntax have new behavior:

Syntax	Explanation
project: foo sprint: foo	This will now search for tasks in projects/sprints with names that contain the string "foo". Use project: +foo and sprint: +foo to search for sprints/projects with exactly the name "foo"

Search For Tasks With Attachments

As noted in the table above, the task search language syntax has been extended with has: attachment query type to search for tasks with attachments. New useful search queries are now possible:

• has: attachment to list all tasks with attachments
• has: attachments deleted: yes to list deleted tasks with attachments

Creating More Powerful Queries in Acunote 

In addition to the syntax enhancements described above, Acunote supports a large number of search expressions and operators, as well as the capability to save and share queries. Please refer to the updated Search Help Section in Acunote for further reference.

We are continuing to enhance the search functionality of Acunote, so we welcome feedback and ideas.  Let us know your use cases for search and how we can better support your needs in the future.

Mobile game developer gets productive with Acunote

Steffen Itterheim, co-founder of a mobile gaming company, discovered and adopted Acunote to manage his Agile Development process.  In Steffen's recent post on Tools For Higher Productivity, he describes how he discovered Acunote, and had some nice things to say about its features and UI.

"Getting your work organized certainly helps but with the right tools you can switch to the next gear.  The first thing you’ll need if you’re working with a Team of 4+ people and no shared office is a task planning tool. For our purposes it needed to be an Agile tool, moreover it should fit well into the concepts of Scrum. And after we considered and even tried out a couple of web-based tools we just gave up. The tool we wanted didn’t seem to exist."

"And that’s where Acunote fell in place. Out of nothing came a tool none of us has ever heard of and it fulfilled almost all of our expectations! It lets you organize your tasks in a Backlog and Sprints and tracks all changes with beautifully simple burndown charts. Overall it works fast and elegantly, allowing you to change important aspects of each task inline – it avoids the dreaded web-based app productivity that follows the principle of: click item, load new page, scroll/select, make change, save change, load previous page, re-orient yourself. Instead, you just click on the Task Description, Priority, Owner, Estimation and so on, make your change, leave the text field and your change is saved automatically."

Read the rest of Steffen's post for more details.

New Feature: Guest Role

Acunote had role-based access control since beginning, but so far it provided only two predefined roles - Admin and User. Many customers asked us to add a third role for Guest users with read-only access to the organization data. Today I'm pleased to announce that Guest role is ready and available for all our customers on any pricing plan including the Free plan!

When implementing the Guest role, we've put a lot of work to redesign access control to guarantee security today and assure extensibility tomorrow.

Role in Acunote now defines a set of privileges for certain operations in the system. We implemented the white-list, "everything that is not allowed is forbidden" approach to security. This way we guarantee that the user can perform only those operations that are explicitly allowed by granting him a privilege.

The privilege that allows read-only access to projects and all data within projects is called view projects, sprints and tasks. This is what is granted for all users with the new "Guest" role.

"User" role grants privileges to create, update or delete sprints, tasks, tags, comments and attachments. "Admin" role additionally grants update org privilege to change organization settings. Privileges to create, update or delete users and repositories are also granted by the "Admin" role.

You can review the permission-to-role mapping in administrative interface under "Edit Organization" => "Roles". As before, roles (including "Guest" now) are assigned with the user management interface under "Edit Organization" => "Users".

We'd love get your feedback on how well Guest role works and how we can further improve the role-based access control. We anticipate that you may wish to customize predefined roles or create your own ones. This is surely coming in the feature and will be announced separately.

New Feature: Priority and Severity

We're pleased to announce that it is now possible to set priority and severity for tasks. This was the long awaited feature commonly requested by our users. As you may have noted, priority column already appeared in the task and issue lists. It's also there in the task details page.

Severity is not automatically enabled because it will mostly be useful for those people who use Acunote as a bugtracker or who used bugtrackers a lot in the past. Should you decide that you need severity, you can turn it on (and off) in the "Organization Settings" page (only organization administrators can do that). From that page you can also disable (or reenable) priority if you choose to avoid using it.

You might wonder what you can do with these new fields. Right now we have 4 levels of priority and severity from P1 to P4 and from S1 to S4. There's also special P0 priority intended to be used for emergency/very urgent tasks. Severities follow priorities in numbering for a reason. This covers the usecase when severity is set by a developer (or reporter) and priority is set by a manager when he prioritizes the tasks in the sprint. In the future you'll be able to increase the number of priorities/severities and define your own, but at this moment it's not allowed.

Apart from additional columns, Acunote UI also lets you filter by priority and severity in the tasklist and search both from Search input box and from Issues page. Search language accepts commands like priority: P1 and severity: S1. There's also special search syntax priority: none and severity: none to search for tasks without any priority and severity set.

We hope you will enjoy this new feature and would like to remind that this is only a start. We'll come up with more functionality around priorities and severities in the future, and for that we'd like to hear from you how you'd use priorities and severities and what are your use cases for them.

New Task Status - Will Not Do

When you work on your tasks, it sometimes happens that you don't have to do any work to close the task. Your task may be a duplicate of another task or it may happen that the required work has been already done. If the task is added to fix a bug in the system, you may be unable to reproduce that bug or you may conclude that the bug is not fixable.

In all those cases the task requires no work and needs to be closed as such. Previously you'd have to clear the task estimate and change status to Completed. Starting from today, there's a dedicated "Will Not Do" status in Acunote to represent all the usecases described above.

When you mark the task as "Will Not Do", Acunote treats it as the task without any work to do. Burndown and Prediction are not affected by "Will Not Do" tasks at all (so you don't have to clear the estimate). The amount of "will not do" work is only shown in progress reports and task status bar charts. Of course, there's a filtering for such tasks and there's a new "status: Will\ Not\ Do" task/issue search language operator available.

New Feature: News Feed

New Feature: News Feed

Today we are pleased to announce the new feature -- News Feed. It allows you to keep track of and get notified about the most important events in Acunote via an RSS feed, email, or both. You can configure News Feed and choose what type of events to monitor and how to get notified.

Old Way of Getting Notifications

Previously, the only option to receive the list of recent changes was to turn on the project-wide email notifications. With that option turned on, all users assigned to projects received emails for every single change to the project, its sprints and tasks. That wasn't a very flexible solution so we worked hard to improve it and came up with a News Feed.

What is News Feed?

News Feed is simply the list of new changes in Acunote that are important for you. You have four ways to control which changes are important and which are not.

1. You can watch the whole project keep track of sprints and tasks. By default you will be notified about major task events (creations, deletions, completions) and other changes in sprints and the project itself. Additionally you can choose to get minor task events as well (use the News Feed settings interface available under "Edit Profile" => "News Feed" tab).

When you watch the project and have all three notification options (major task events, minor task events and other events) turned on, your News Feed will work in the same way as the project-wide "Email Notifications" settings worked before.

2. You can watch individual tasks and get notified about any modifications, comments and attachments. Just like for projects, it's also possible to fine-tune the notifications you get in the News Feed by including or excluding major and minor task events.

3. You can control which events you receive for tasks you created. By default you will receive all notifications about changes in tasks that you created, and the News Feed settings interface makes it possible to change this.

4. You can control which events you receive for tasks you own. By default you will receive all notifications about changes in tasks that you own, and once again the News Feed settings interface makes it possible to change this.

Email or RSS?

By default only RSS is turned on for the News Feed. Should you want to get emails as well, turn on the "Email" checkbox in the News Feed settings form as seen in the screenshot above. It's your choice. Since you may not want to get email notification for chances you make yourself, you can disable this using "Suppress emails for changes made by me" checkbox in the News Feed settings.

As an additional usability enhancement Acunote's notifications emails are setup so your email client will group messages for each task into a single thread.

How Do I Control Who Gets Notified?

Users can normally only add (or remove) themselves to the Project Watch Lists and Task Watch Lists. The corresponding "Watch" and "Stop Watching" links will be available in the 'Sprints' page for the Project Watch List and in the 'Task Details' page for the Task Watch List:

Organization administrators can add or remove any user from watch lists on those pages and on 'Project Settings' page as well:

What Happened To The Old Settings?

Old settings were transparently migrated. For projects with email notifications turned on, we added all assigned users added to the project watch list. We also enabled 'Email' option for those users. These users will receive fewer email notification than before since minor task changes are now excluded. To exactly replicate the old notifications behavior users should turn minor task change notification back on for watched project on their News Feed settings page.

Your Feedback

We'd love get your feedback on how News Feed is working for you, and how we can make it better.

Announcing Alpha Version of Issue Tracking in Acunote

Today we are introducing a preview of a new feature in Acunote - issue tracking. The functionality is not yet complete, but we making it available as an alpha release to get your impressions and suggestions as early as possible.

What is Issue Tracking in Acunote?

An issue in a bugtracker is a piece of work that needs to be resolved. Bug trackers let you capture all the artifacts related to this work, track and manage state transitions, query and analyze all past and future work. As an advanced project management tool, Acunote could do much of this already. It just lacked functionality to support issuetracker view onto the data that was already in the system.

Project management is about planning and tracking work. Within this world-view, it makes sense to treat sprints/iterations/project plans as a top-level object, and view individual units of work (tasks) within this context. Issue tracking views individual units of work (bugs/issues/tasks) as top-level objects, and lets you work with them with no regard for scheduling. Rather than relying on predetermined iterations for lists of issues, issue tracker lets you dynamically query for relevant subsets of issues.

No matter how you track it, the work that needs to be done does not change. You want to be able to keep track of everything associated with this work, as the issue tracker lets you, and you want to be able to schedule this work, as project management software lets you. Acunote now supports both approaches, with a no-compromises implementation on which we insist.

Much of the hard work was already done for multi-sprint tasks which made tasks into first class entities, and added explicit task numbers. Issue tracking now lets you treat these first class tasks as issues, query them, and create issues without having to assign them to sprints. The datamodel lets us keep the system remains DRY, with one task/issue for each unit of work. In addition task/issue details view has been enhanced, and supports all the operations previously only possible from the task list view in a sprint.

The system is notable for what it lacks -- restrictions and fuss. You can schedule an issue to one sprint, to multiple sprints or to no sprints at all. Each sprint can have it's own hierarchy, and you can evolve the hierarchies in agile fashion without losing past data. You can create issues/tasks from the project management side (nothing has changed there), and they will now also be accessible through issue tracking interface. You can create issues/tasks from the Issue page, and later assign them to sprints. You can update tasks/issue from sprint, issue list, and task/issue details page with a consistent interface.

A small note on terms. We use words "task" and "issue" interchangeably, e.g. "task 1234" means the same thing as "issue 1234", because they are the same thing. We tend to prefer "task" in the context of project management, and "issue" in the context of issue tracking.

What Functionality is New?

• new Issues tab
• issues list with pagination, in-place editing and keyboard shortcuts
• issues filtering with a custom search language
• task details page enhancements
• soft-deletion of issues

We added Issues tab which shows all tasks in Acunote as issues and provides the usual bugtracker-like management interface for them.

Creation and modification is the same good old in-place creation and modification you know from the task list. There's an interface to tag/untag issues, and a new interface to assign selected issues to sprints.

You can filter issues using a powerful search/filtering language. For example, to search for unresolved issues created by user Joe and owned by user Kate which have word "screenshot" somewhere in description you'd search for:

screenshot status: "Not Started" OR status: "In Progress" creator: Joe owner: Kate

If you ever used advanced search features of Google Search or Gmail you'll notice the similarity. It's essentially the same language extended with Acunote-specific operators. We added a search and filtering language help section describing this in detail. You'll find a link to the help section near the search box on Issues page.

As mentioned above, issue details view has been enhanced, and supports in-place issue editing, tag operations, sprint assignment operations previously only possible from the task list view in a sprint. This was a common enhancement request, and we are happy to deliver.

Future work

While immediately useful, the issue tracking functionality is still in "alpha." We advise not to rely on it for everyday use just yet. We kindly ask you to give it a try and tell us what you think. User feedback is essential to us, so we are making this available as early as possible to get it. We are continuing to extend issue tracking, and will be deploying new functionality as it becomes available.