Hi hacknplanners,

I hope you all are having a wonderful summer! We have just released a new update that includes some anticipated improvements and features.

Ready? Go!

Story tasks on the kanban board

When we released the user story feature recently, we wanted to give you a way to define complete features as kanban items that could contain specific tasks inside that you could manage, move and prioritize as a whole; this way you could simplify your boards by adding a new layer of organization to your project. However, this also caused that managing story tasks became a bit cumbersome, not being able to easily track their progress as the rest of the items. Many of you requested this, so here it is: story tasks are now displayed on the boards along with their respective user stories and other tasks. More details:

• When a user story is selected, the contained tasks are marked on the board with a light blue selection; this way is easy to spot where all the tasks of the story are. Also, when you select a story task, the user story is also marked.
• If you enter the name of the user story in the search box of the kanban header, both the story and the tasks will remain on the board. This is a great way to create an isolated view of the story.
• The user story tasks will be also displayed on their own category board.
• The display of story tasks on the kanban board can be disabled from the filters dropdown on the header of the board.
• Additionally, story tasks are now included in other work item visualizations, like in design elements, dashboards, metrics or the Gantt chart.

Gantt chart improvements (Studio)

This is the first of a series of improvements and new additions to our Gantt chart. Even though our tool has been always agile-oriented, we understand the need for a way to manage the roadmap and visualize upcoming deadlines and milestones over a timeline. We will continue to improve our Gantt to make it more intuitive, useful and interactive. This update includes:

• We finally display work items (tasks and user stories) on the Gantt chart. To enable this, we added a Start date field to items that need to be filled up along with the Due date in order to properly display the item on the timeline.
• We added Hour as a new time scale. This is useful when you want to be granular moving or resizing the Gantt elements.
• The milestones, boards, design elements or work items displayed on the Gantt are resizable and movable (as long as you have permissions), so you can easily reorganize them without having to modify their dates individually. When you resize or move a Gantt element (except when you are in Hour scale) it automatically snaps to 3 specific hour anchors: the beginning of the day (00:00 local time), start of working day (9:00) and the end of working day (9:00 + the number of workday hours set in your Timetable configuration). These anchors will be configurable in the next iteration. The auto snap won’t work for days that are not set as working days on the Timetable configuration (such as weekends or days off), which are greyed out in the timeline.
• When an element has no dates set, you can add dates to it by drawing the element on the timeline using drag and drop (you only can do this if the option Show items without dates is active).
• We added three different visualization modes for the Gantt:
  • Board: It displays the tree structure of milestones, boards, and work items.
  • Design: It displays the tree structure of design elements with their assigned work items.
  • User: It displays the assigned work items of the user on the timeline. This is a great way to see the expected workload of a user over time.
• By default, only elements that are currently open are displayed on the chart. However, you can include closed ones by selecting it from the Filter dropdown on the header of the Gantt. It also allows you to show or hide elements that have no date set. Important: enabling both options could lead to a very big amount of data being retrieved and displayed, which could affect the performance of the chart.

As I said, this is just the first of several updates until we have a fully-featured Gantt chart, something many of you are waiting for. These are the improvements coming soon:

• Creation of new milestones, boards, design elements or work items directly on the timeline, drawing the element using drag and drop.
• Custom markers, that will be displayed in all the modes.
• Configuration of auto snap anchors.
• Progress of elements.
• Advanced filters.
• Workspace Gantt charts, to see all studio projects at once on the timeline.

Other improvements

• Board cloning, including all the items inside.
• Expandable/collapsible kanban category panel (Plus & Studio)
• Fixed position of the work item and design element fields on the edition panel.
• Game design element display choices (include children, work item filters…) are now remembered.
• Other small visual improvements.

Bug fixes

• The burndown chart showed weird initial values in some scenarios.
• Sometimes, while being on a specific category board, when items were created with another category, the board was not properly updated and needed a refresh to display them.
• When forcing the backlog on item creation was activated, adding story tasks would end up on those tasks being wrongly assigned to the backlog when the user story was not, making them impossible to move among stages.

I hope you liked the update, don’t hesitate to contact us with comments, feedback, suggestions… See you soon with more news!

Happy planning!