Hi hacknplanners!

A new update is live! I have to say I couldn’t deliver all the features I initially planned for this iteration due to personal impediments, however I managed to bring you some little improvements that are very useful and can make a difference. Let’s check them out!

Features and improvements

• Importance level for tasks: We have added a new field to tasks, called Importance. This value represents how important or prioritary a task is, so the team knows whether it should be tackled as soon as possible or postponed until others are completed. A new field has been added to the creation and update forms for tasks. Depending on the selected importance level, an icon will appear on the task card, so you can spot important tasks at a glance. This is specially useful for bugs. The available importance levels are:
  • Urgent: The highest importance, the task should be accomplished immediately. It’s displayed as a red warning sign on the task card.
  • High: High priority, should be done soon, but is not as critical as the Urgent level. It’s displayed as an orange up arrow.
  • Normal (default): This level indicates the task has a normal importance. Most tasks should be in this level in order to guarantee this system is useful (nothing is urgent if everything is). No icon is shown for this level.
  • Low: This level indicates the task has to be accomplished at some point, but only when the rest are completed. It’s displayed as a grey down arrow.

• Game model element progress: We added a progress bar to the game model elements. This way you can track how the project is going from a general and conceptual point of view. The progress is calculated using the number of open and closed tasks inside an element and all its children.

• Game model element displayed on task card: In order to provide more context to boards, we added the game model element name to the task cards. In the future we will provide a configuration panel to enable or disable the fields displayed in the card.

• Improved task cards in game model page: We created a unified view of the tasks, so you can see the same card in the board and in the game model page. You can now clone, assign users, change milestone or delete tasks directly from the game model element view, so you don’t have to move to the board.

• Sub-task notifications: We added new notifications, in this case when a sub-task is created, deleted, completed or reopened.

Bug fixes

We fixed just a few minor bugs related to language and color display. We also improved the performance of some backend operations in a 10% or so.

What’s next?

As time passes we will have to work more and more in the official release of HacknPlan, which means we will be adding less features to the public beta and working more in the extension system and other stuff related to the premium part of the service. However, we still have a bunch of features that will be released in the next few months, like more notifications and game model improvements, the backlog page, the search engine…

Happy planning!