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!

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 AgileZen. I love to see the nice things people say about AgileZen on Twitter, but to have someone tell you in person that they love your product is really amazing. I had such a good time showing off the new filtering features, as well as sharing a preview of what’s coming soon. Thanks to everyone who stopped by to chat with me!

If you are curious about what’s next in AgileZen, check out our recent press release. It summarizes the board filtering as well as discusses our upcoming release of filtering capabilities on the performance metrics. In addition to talking about features, it also announces our new discounts for educational institutions and non-profits. We are now offering 50% off a year of our pro, plus, and unlimited accounts for qualifying organizations. We’re happy to be able to give back what we can to people who are doing great things for the community.

I’m looking forward to sharing information about the new filtering capabilities in a few days, so check back soon for the update!

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 be able to re-apply it any time
• Share a filter with your team

We’re working on a manual that contains videos, screenshots, and descriptions of how to use features like filtering, but while we’re working on that, we wanted to be sure everyone could use this feature right away. Here’s a quick video that gives a basic overview of how to use the new filter panel. For even more information, check out the AgileZen wiki at http://learn.agilezen.com/filtering.

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 full-time on her Ph.D.

When we finally launched, I had put in about 500 hours of solid development over the previous six weeks. I was crawling across the finish line. Niki and I were confident that we had a great product, but we weren’t sure if anyone would care enough to buy it, or even if anyone would even pay attention at all.

In the first week after launch, we had over a thousand signups, and we sold enough accounts to easily cover our hosting costs in the first 24 hours. To see that sort of reaction, it made all of the hard work we’d put in worthwhile. We knew we were on to something good.

It’s funny to say that it’s only been a year since we launched, because so much has happened in the meantime. The product has changed dramatically, and sometimes I forget that features we use all the time weren’t included at launch. Not only that, but Niki and I have sold the company, and moved from Akron to Raleigh to work for Rally Software. All great things — but our lives are very different than they were a year ago.

The other day, I stumbled across the very first mockup of the AgileZen interface, and on the product’s birthday, we thought it’d be fitting to share it with everyone.

It sounds silly when I think about it now, but originally I wanted the interface to be all grayscale, so it would blend into the background and let users focus on their work. I’m glad we didn’t go quite that far, but you can see shades of the approach in today’s version of AgileZen, and I’d venture to say we’ve succeeded so far in our goal of staying out of our users way.

Now that we’ve joined Rally, we’ve got all kinds of crazy ideas about things we can add to AgileZen. Some of these you’ll start seeing soon — very soon, actually — and some others we’re still debating about whether they belong in the product in the first place. After all, we’re still dedicated to keeping AgileZen simple and easy to use above all else. Now that Brec’s joined the team, we’ve got the capacity to implement some great stuff that we’ve always wanted but kept pushing off because of lack of time.

Not only that, but we can start taking shots at some of the harder problems people have in managing their work — problems that we’ve always felt AgileZen was uniquely positioned to solve.

Both us and the product have come a long way over the past year, but we have a long way to go and a lot of work still to do. Thanks to everyone for helping us along the way, and be sure to stay tuned over the next few months, because there’s some fantastic stuff coming.

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 Raleigh office at Rally. He’s a great addition since he values user experience as much as we do, and we’re definitely excited to have another person to help create the awesome features we have in our backlog. He’ll be getting up to speed on the code over the next few weeks and starting to tackle aspects of our API.

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 lot of people ask what’s next for us, so I wanted to let everyone know what we’ve been working on and what’s in our backlog.

You may not have noticed, but we’ve had a few releases since early April to fix bugs that have popped up. In terms what’s next, we’ll be implementing filtering by tags. This has been by far our most requested feature and will help teams focus on what’s important on their board. It fits with the AgileZen philosophy of making a tool that is simple and flexible, since filtering will allow users to group stories in any way they want.

In addition to working on some new features, the AgileZen team will be hiring a developer! If you are interested or know someone who might be, you should definitely check out the job description. We’re excited to bring someone else on board, so we can get new ideas and deliver features faster to our customers.

Now that we are mostly settled in Raleigh, we definitely want to blog more, so stay tuned for our upcoming posts!

When we started working on AgileZen, our goal was to build a product that helped people work together to become more productive. When we launched in July, we thought we’d created something special, but to be honest, we’ve been continually amazed by the positive attention that AgileZen has received. Nate and I wanted to take a minute to say thanks to everyone who has cheered us along as well as share some great news with all of you.

Today we’re excited to announce that AgileZen has been acquired by Rally Software, an organization that has done and continues to do great things in the Agile space. We didn’t build AgileZen with the intent of being acquired, but after we met the Rally team, it was obvious that we could do some amazing work together. After meeting with the Rally team in February, we found that their vision for AgileZen, ideas about company culture, and business philosophies matched up very well with our own, and it felt like working together was the right decision for the product and our customers. By teaming up with Rally, we can tap the knowledge and experience of the market leader in Agile and make an even greater impact in the Lean community.

The most obvious question is how the acquisition will affect our current and future customers, so we wanted to be sure to address any questions or concerns that people might have. First and foremost, don’t worry – the AgileZen service will not change for the foreseeable future. Nate and I will still be responsible for the design, development, and support of AgileZen, and it will still operate as a simple, flexible, and cost-effective project collaboration tool. We are committed to continuing to build approachable software with a great user experience, and now with the additional resources of Rally behind us, we can offer an even better service to our customers. We look forward to sharing a more detailed roadmap soon because we have some great enhancements in the queue.

On a personal note, Nate and I will be moving to Raleigh, North Carolina in May to work from Rally’s office there. Before we move, we will be attending the Lean Software and Systems Conference in Atlanta from April 21-23, where we will be demonstrating AgileZen, so if you are around, please stop by the Rally booth and say hi!

If you have any questions about AgileZen and Rally, please don’t hesitate to email either of us:

Nate: nate.kohari@rallydev.com
Niki: niki.kohari@rallydev.com

Or you can always get in touch with us on Twitter:

Nate: @nkohari
Niki: @nikibeth

Thanks again for all of your support and we are looking forward to working with Rally to make AgileZen even better!

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!

When we launched Zen last year, we decided not to accept payment via purchase order. This was mainly due to the effort required to process them – credit card transactions are very easy to automate, which allows us offer Zen at a much lower cost to our customers.

Since then, we’ve had several people ask us to allow them to pay via purchase order. We hate turning customers away, so we’ve changed our policy and are now accepting purchase orders for customers interested in the Unlimited, Plus, or Pro plans, who are willing to be billed annually instead of monthly.

For more information, check out our updated pricing page, and if you have any questions, feel free to send us an email.

Zen went live in July and the past four months have been a blur. Over the last few weeks we’ve been relatively quiet, as we took a step back and focused on improving our infrastructure, code quality, user experience, and performance, and snuck a few features in while we were at it.

So, without further ado, here’s a quick tour around what we’ve been up to:

New Public-Facing Website

First, by now you’ve probably noticed that our blog has a new theme. This is to match our completely-redesigned public-facing website! When we launched the original site back in May, Zen was still under heavy development, and parts of the application were pretty ugly to look at. That’s why our old public-facing site didn’t feature much in the way of screenshots. Now that Zen has stabilized and we’ve been able to put a coat of polish on it, we’ve created a brand-new video tour to demonstrate the product.

File Attachments

We’ve mentioned it was in the works already, but we’re happy to announce that paid plans now support file attachments! File storage is determined by your plan size: the Personal plan comes with 3GB of storage, the Pro plan has 10GB, Plus has 20GB, and Unlimited has as much as you’d like. You can upload multiple files at once (think Gmail), and once attached, files are available with a quick click directly from the board. Attachments can be up to 50MB in size, which we think should be enough for any uses – if you need more, let us know, and we can tweak the maximum.

Archived Projects

The new version also introduces the ability to archive projects. When you archive a project, it’s taken offline, but all of your data is retained, so you can access it again if you ever need it. Only paid plans support archived projects, and the project limit for each plan now represents the number of active projects you can have at once – there’s no limit on the number of archived projects.

New Story Screen

One of our favorite new features in the new version is a much-improved story screen. Originally, the story screen was mostly a read-only area, where you could view performance metrics and the history for a given story. In the new version, anything you can do to a story from the board, you can also do from the story screen – including editing tags, colors, moving the story between phases, attaching files, etc. Certain things can only be done from the story screen, like renaming and deleting attachments, and deleting the story itself. We’re trying hard to avoid the temptation to cram a lot of functionality onto the limited real estate of the board.

Soft WIP Limits

(Edit: Forgot to mention this one originally!) If you’re using work-in-progress (WIP) limits, you’ll notice that you can now override them as necessary. Your process, and by extension Zen, should never get in the way of your work. Now, if a phase has the exact number of stories to match its WIP limit, its header will turn red, and if you over-fill it, the entire column will turn red to indicate that the WIP limit has been violated. To see the new WIP limits in action, check out the video here, under Focus at the job on hand.

User Experience Improvements

We’ve also made significant improvements to the user experience, and we’re pretty confident we’ve squashed pretty much every bug that you’ve pointed out. Naturally, if you find any issues (new or still-lingering), let us know… we need you to keep us honest. :)

We’ve also made some dramatic improvements to our infrastructure, and while you won’t appreciate them as much as us, we’re confident that it will allow us to speed our release cadence dramatically going forward. This means more features and faster bug fixes, which is something that our users will appreciate more than cleaner code. :)

Performance Improvements

We’ve introduced bundling for our CSS and JavaScript files. This means that all of our different scripts are combined into a single file, which is then optimized, and delivered to you in compressed form. Zen’s CSS stylesheet is now only 14KB, all of the JavaScript for the entire application is only 125KB, and you only need to download it once! Long story short, this should dramatically improve Zen’s performance; particularly the speed at which individual pages load.

30-Day Money-Back Guarantee

Last but certainly not least, because we’re sure you’ll love Zen if you try it out, we’re now offering 30-day money-back guarantees on all paid plans. If you cancel your account or downgrade to the free plan within 30 days of purchasing, any charges that were applied to your account automatically refunded. We’ve updated our terms of service and billing policy to represent this change, so please give them another once-over to see the changes. (Only the sections involving refunds have been altered, the rest is exactly the same.)

The Road Ahead

So, what’s next? Well, on this release we deviated pretty dramatically from our usual way of doing business. Since several of the updates were interrelated (particularly with the new public-facing website), we were forced to move away from our typical cadence of releasing new features constantly. Believe me when I say we’re excited to get back to doing rapid-fire releases over the next few weeks!

The next two features that we’re planning to roll out will be the ability to create task lists within each story, and the introduction of a powerful new search engine. We will be returning to release-per-feature, with a goal of a new release every week.

Thanks again very much to everyone who’s sent in feedback, and please keep it coming, along with any questions you might have. It’s fantastic to see so many people as excited as we are about Zen, and we love hearing from each and every one of you!