We followed up our big release last Thursday with a (thankfully!) much smaller one. We’ve fixed a few stray bugs that snuck into the release, and introduced a couple of features that were “low-hanging fruit”:

Priorities

Story cards now have a formal priority field, which can be set from the story screen. We’ve typically used the position of the story on the board to indicate relative priority, and tags to collect stories into priority groups, but after several users asked us for a formal place to put priorities, we decided that it would make a nice addition to the product.

Priority works just like the size field, in that it’s just free-form text. We plan to use the MOSCOW system to assign values (must, should, could, would), replacing our tags of the same names, but if you’d like to use numeric values or your own rating system instead, go for it. When you give a story a priority, it appears on the story card’s header next to the story size, as well as being displayed on the sidebar of the story screen.

Deadlines

Story cards now also have a deadline field, which is also edited on the story screen. This provides a nice way to mark tasks that have a hard delivery date. When you give a story a deadline, it appears on the card header, like size and priority:

When the deadline is today, or has already passed, the date will turn red to indicate that the story may be overdue:

Task lists within stories are on the way next. Keep the feedback coming!