Acunote

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.

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.

Multi-sprint Tasks, True Task Identity, Explicit Task Numbering

Yesterday we deployed a major release of Acunote and we'd like to tell you more about it.

We usually deploy new code with feature enhancements and bugfixes couple of times a week. Hosted software model and good development practices give us this luxury, and let us rapidly evolve the application based on user feedback. We take great care to make the experience completely transparent to the users, by preserving backwards compatibility, evolving UI very slowly and even preserving active logins/session during most upgrades.

This release is different. Once again, we worked hard to do what our users need. We tried and mostly succeeded in minimizing UI changes, but underneath that we've changed the entire task management model behind Acunote to make all the things you've asked for possible.

Old Task Model

In the old Acunote the task could only belong to one sprint at a time. If your task wasn't finished in by the end of the sprint, you would copy it to the next sprint to continue there. "Finish Spring" feature used exactly this approach - it took all not-completed tasks from the old sprint and copied them into the new sprint. Upon copying the new task was created in the new sprint duplicating the description and status and adjusting estimate to reflect the work left to do.

That model had its limitations. First, Acunote had no way to know that the new task in the new sprint is actually the old task from the old sprint but just continued in the new sprint. That made per-project reporting and data aggregation problematic because there was no good way to display combined data for the two, essentially the same, tasks. Changes to the original task description, tags, comments, attachments weren't propagated to the copied task and vice versa.

Another limitation was the behavior of tasks in Backlog. Common usecase (especially for people using Agile methodologies) is to create the task in Backlog representing the user story, then break the work into smaller subtasks and split that work between sprints. Acunote allowed you to copy this user story task from the Backlog into individual sprints and add subtasks with concrete work in each of the sprints. But there was no way to gather that information back from all those sprints and display the overall progress of the user story.

And finally, the old model prevented us from ever showing task numbers. The two tasks in our examples, one copied from another, are conceptually the same, hence they should have the same number, and that was not possible before.

Multi-sprint Tasks

New task model allows tasks to span multiple sprints. This is especially useful for parent tasks representing long projects/user stories, with children in multiple sprints. Another common use would be concrete tasks which take more than one sprint to complete.

As usual Acunote allows the user freedom to setup his project as he sees fit: each sprint can have its own hierarchy, concrete task can evolve and become parent, you can schedule sprints as you see fit including overlapping and parallel sprints, etc. The restrictions should come from good development/project management principles, not from the tool.

Existing UI has been extended to take advantage of this. Now, when you copy task you don't copy any task information. Instead copying task to another sprint will just assign the task to the new sprint, in addition to any sprints it was already in. "Finish Sprint" works the same way.

Existing data in all organizations was migrated to take advantage of this functionality. The code looked for "Copy" events and combined source and target tasks provided it was safe, i.e. the user did not change description after copying. Estimate/remaining, tags, comments, attachments, etc. were similarly combined. This was the most complex migration we ever had and (fully automated) it took hours to run over all the organizations in Acunote. That was the reason we had to schedule downtime for this upgrade.

True Task Identity

Task is a fundamental real-life concept, and project management system should reflect this. New Acunote datamodel allows us to view task (user story/task/unit of work) as a first class entity, not just as a part of a sprint (certain timeframe).

So now, task has its own history of estimates, remainings, owners, statuses, etc. It maintains single description, set of comments, attachments, history events, etc. This way both the sprint task list and the task details views make sense, and present appropriate information. There is no longer a compromise necessary to support sprints/time-boxing.

Since task becomes a first class concept, we can assign it an identity in the form of explicit task number. This number is persistent, and can be used to refer to the task. This was the most commonly requested feature for Acunote.

The Future

So far we've barely scratched the surface of functionality made possible by the new data model. Now that it has been deployed, we'll be going to back to our usual user feedback-driven incremental development. First, there are also some rough corners left to smooth after this major change, and that's the first priority for us. Beyond that, the new data model allows incredible flexibility and power to represent real-life projects, and to provide visibility into them at any desired level. We have a lot of exciting features being baked to take advantage of this. We don't talk about vaporware, so we'll let the development speak for itself.

Known Issues

• Help -- we'll updating it and will cover the underlying task representation, task operations and examples of use in more depth.

• Performance -- some operations became slower. We are aware of this, and are actively working to restore the performance. We made good progress on it today (Monday) and have already deployed the results. We'll keep you updated on this very important point.

• Edge cases around multi-sprint functionality -- we know about some some edge cases where new functionality can display puzzling results. For these, we are working on better way present this data. If you find anything that surprises you, just send us a feedback and we'll take a look.

• You can no longer edit task from the task details page. This will be fixed.

Add Attachment Usability Enhancement

Hi. Have you ever wanted to attach the file to a task from the task list and felt just a bit annoyed because you had to go to the task details page to do that? That little annoyance is now gone.. Just open the task menu in the task list and you will find brand new "Add Attachment" menu item. Enjoy!

Performance is a feature!

Last two months we've been quiet but that's not because we extended our Christmas holidays, but because we've worked hard to make Acunote fast.

First, we worked together with Engine Yard (our hosting provider) guys to profile and improve our server infrastructure. Organizations that use email notifications should notice the difference - the new mail server adds virtually no overhead to all operations that send emails. Please note, that occasional delays still can happen (mostly because of the database server) but we're sure those problems will be solved as well.

Second, we improved the performance of our own application and the framework we use. Geeky readers and Ruby on Rails developers among you might be interested in the story of our travails and the changes we've made.

At the end, we've got some impressive results here comparing to the beginning of December:

Acceleration	Acunote Features
7.0x!	Tasklist rearrangements with "Move Here" menu or with drag-n-drop.
4.5x	Tasklist rearrangements by moving tasks to the left.
3.5x	Copying tasks and importing them from CSV. Tasklist rearrangements by moving tasks to the right.
3.0x	Deleting tasks. Rendering the tasklist and progress reports.
2.5x	Signing up to Acunote.
1.5x	Rendering the prediction report. Editing tasks directly from the tasklist.

Enjoy the faster Acunote right now, it's already in production!