As part of our release last Friday, we’ve enabled the ability to switch from monthly to yearly billing in AgileZen. It was highly requested by our customers and with that much demand, we started working on it right away.
We’ve had many customers who tried AgileZen for a few months, liked the simplicity and usability of the product, and wanted to commit to a year on their current plan, so we wanted to make yearly billing easily accessible. We also had a large group of customers that purchased a year of service right after our public launch last year. Since these customers were coming up for renewal and wanted to continue with another year of service, it was time to build the ability to choose yearly billing into the software.
If you are currently on a monthly cycle and you’d like to switch to yearly, you can do so by clicking on “change billing” on your dashboard. The best part is that if you commit to a year of service in advance, you’ll receive a month of service for free!
We hope you’ve been enjoying the new filtering feature in AgileZen. In our latest release, we’ve extended filtering to include the performance metrics as well as added new key performance indicators. You’ll also notice the improved usability and new charts on the performance screen.
The same filtering capabilities that were added to the board in AgileZen are now available for the performance metrics, which means that you can examine your performance by slicing your data on everything from color, size, priority, owner, tag, and more! Filtering these metrics will help to more accurately forecast story completion because they take into account differences between stories. For example, because high priority items are very important they will likely move through your value stream faster than other stories.
In addition to slicing the metrics based on aspects of a story, you can now examine performance based on a selected period of time. The date panel allows you to pick date ranges to determine whether performance has increased, decreased, or stayed the same over time, which could help your team improve.
Lastly, we’ve added and changed a few metrics based on customer feedback. Throughput is a new metric that shows the number of stories completed for the time period selected. Also, our previous calculation of wait time took into account all the time that stories were marked either ready to pull or blocked. Now wait time only includes stories that are marked ready to pull and blocked time is the time stories spend blocked. Because the cause of high wait time is typically different than the cause of high blocked time, having these metrics separate can help you better understand the reasons for bottlenecks in your process.
This week was Agile 2010 in Orlando. I had a great time, learned a lot, and got to hang out with my Rally colleagues from Boulder. I spent some of my time in the booth doing demos and meeting people. The booth was really busy, and it was great to see people so excited about [...]
We’re excited to announce a new feature in AgileZen: filtering the board! You can now filter your board on everything from a story’s colors to tags to owner and more! Some of this feature’s highlights are the ability to:
Toggle between fading or hiding information that doesn’t apply to your filter
Name and save a filter to [...]
One year ago today, we launched AgileZen to the public. It had been a long road to get to launch. Niki and I had been building the product during nights and weekends for a long time, while I was still working a full time job, and she was still working on her Ph.D.
When we finally [...]
In one of our prior posts, we mentioned that we were looking for a developer for the AgileZen team. After several interviews, we are happy to announce that today is Brec Carson’s first day working with us! We didn’t have to look very far, since Brec was already working on the Analytics team in the [...]
Last Friday the Rally office in Raleigh moved to a new location. We’re mostly settled in, so I thought I would share pictures of the new home for the AgileZen team. You can see in the pictures that Nate is working hard on new features for the product. There’s also plenty of room in the [...]
As part of our goal of making an easy-to-use product, we want to find ways to offer better help documentation to our users, so you can have access to the information and resources you need at any time. While you certainly don’t need training to use AgileZen, we’d like to provide some examples and demos, [...]
When we launched AgileZen, we were looking to create a simple tool that had the flexibility to be applied to many different situations. Since that time, we’ve had the pleasure of talking with people who use AgileZen in unique ways, far beyond what we could have imagined. We’ve heard stories from lawyers who have embraced [...]
The AgileZen team has been quiet for a while since Nate and I have been preparing to move from Ohio to North Carolina to join the Rally office in Raleigh. We made the trek down to Raleigh about a week ago and are getting settled in at the office. Since the acquisition, we’ve had a [...]