As some of you have already noticed, we released a new version of Zen last night! This version has quite a few changes, but the most significant is the addition of task lists inside of stories. Here’s a quick tour to give you an idea of how to use the feature.

You can add tasks to a story when you create it by clicking the Edit Tasks button on the Add Stories panel. From the board, you can add add tasks to an existing story by clicking the new tasks button on the story toolbar:

You can add tasks to a story from the story screen as well. Once a story has tasks, you will see an additional section on the story card, similar to the one shown for file attachments. This summary indicates both the total number of tasks and the number that have been completed, along with a rough completion percentage:

Bear in mind that if all of the tasks are not equal in size, this completion percentage isn’t a perfect indicator of how much of the story is complete. Still, it can be helpful to check the completion status of a story at a quick glance. To view the specific tasks, click the summary, and the card will fold out:

As you can see, this story describes the development of a simple e-commerce payment page. You can re-order tasks by grabbing a task’s drag handle (on the left) and moving it into the position you want. If you decide you don’t want a task anymore, the button at the right will delete it from the story. Unlike stories, there is no process for tasks to travel through – they’re either finished or not. To mark a task as finished, click its checkbox. From then on, when the story’s task list is expanded, Zen will show a description of who finished the task and when:

To collapse the task list again, click Hide. In this case, since we checked off a task, the story’s task summary will be updated to reflect the new status:

So, that’s a quick tour of tasks. While you should obviously feel free to use the feature however works best for you, remember that tasks typically should not line up with the columns on your board. For example, if you have a phase on your board called Test, you probably shouldn’t add a task called “test this story.” However, you might want to add multiple tasks related to testing, like “regression testing” and “cross-browser UI testing”, both of which are expected to be finished within the Test phase.

The easiest way to think about it is that your story is a goal that you want to achieve, the tasks are steps toward that specific goal, and your phases are the milestones that all stories must move through in order to reach completion.

Like I said, tasks are the biggest addition, but certainly not the only one. We’ve made quite a few bug fixes and usability tweaks:

1. You can now set priority, deadline, and owner when creating a story, instead of having to go to the story screen to set them.
2. Switched to MarkdownSharp for Markdown rendering, which means we’re now running on the same flavor of Markdown as used by Github and Stack Overflow.
3. URLs within Markdown-enabled fields are now automatically turned into hyperlinks.
4. Added the ability to link to stories by entering the story number in any Markdown-enabled field; for example: entering #123 will create a link to story 123.
5. Removed the hotkeys for expanding the backlog and archive which were interfering with some users’ keyboard-fu. (We have plans to add a lot more keyboard shortcuts to the app, so they’ll be back eventually.)
6. The magnifying glass on stories is a normal link again, instead of being controlled by JavaScript. This means you can right-click and copy the URL for a story, or middle-click to open it in a new tab.
7. The problem where some projects’ cycle time charts were out of chronological order has been fixed.
8. The problem where some projects’ efficiency ratings were above 100% has been fixed. (Don’t worry, you’re still awesome, just not 5000% awesome! :)
9. Performance charts now respect individual users’ date format selection.
10. We’re no longer relying on HTTP verbs other than GET/POST, which should solve problems with overly-aggressive corporate firewalls.
11. Several other minor visual tweaks.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, we’re all ears!