The newest release of AgileZen includes a few highly requested updates to story cards. These additions will make it even easier to stay organized and visualize your work!

The first update is an indicator of text in the story details section of a story card. The story details section was designed as an open space to add information about a story that provided guidance, context, or help to the user working on it. Since this information would have taken up a lot of space on the board, we opted to show it on the story focus screen, since keeping only the necessities on the board is important for focus and visualization of work. Since some stories might need additional information and some don’t, it left users without an indication of whether there was more context to that particular work item unless they left the board. Now the story details icon (highlighted below) will appear on a story if there’s information available in the story details section. If you click on it, the information will appear in a dialog box. That means not only can you see an indication that a story has details, you can also view it from the board!

The second addition to the story card display is the ability to have an unassigned item. There are times when stories are created and you don’t know who that card will be assigned to until later. Now those cards can be set as unassigned until work is ready to begin. This makes it clear to your team what work items in the queue still need an owner. Assigned cards have a user’s name and avatar in the top right corner, but unassigned story cards show that no team member is responsible for the work item yet (shown below). When you hover that section of the story card, it will indicate that you can click that area to assign the card.

The ability to set cards as unassigned also means that you can create a filter to see all the stories that don’t have an owner. By creating the filter of owner:unassigned, you’ll be able to see all the cards that still need to be assigned to a team member since this filter will fade or hide all the cards that already have an owner.

One last note on filtering, to make it easy for users to see the stories they own, we implemented owner:me as a way to see all the cards assigned to you without having to type in your name or username! The same applies to stories that you created as creator:me will show only those stories that you created.

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.

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, so that you can draw from this information when you set up your own processes. While we are currently using the questions we get through support to start the development of this help system, we’d like additional feedback to make sure we cover the most important questions.

We’d like to know what you’d like to see in terms of content. For example, we’d love to know what information you wish you knew when you started using the product. I’ll be collecting all of the feedback and using it to inform the help documentation. If you have something you’d like to share, you can comment here, send me an email at niki.kohari@rallydev.com, or reply via twitter to @agilezen.

Zen is designed to be open-ended, so you can use it that way that’s most helpful for your team, and adjust how you work as you find new ways to become more efficient.

However, Zen’s flexibility can make it difficult to understand how to get started, so we thought it might be helpful to explain how we use Zen to work on Zen. This should give a couple of ideas on how Zen can be customized to fit the needs of individuals and teams.

Our workflow is customized into three phases we called prepare, develop, and deploy:

• Stories in the prepare phase are “on our radar”, and require research, definition, or specification, but no development/creative work has actually been done yet.
• Stories in the develop phase have work artifacts (code, design comps, etc.) in progress but are unfinished.
• Stories in the deploy phase represent completed work that is ready to go live, but stories aren’t considered “done” until they’re in the hands of our customers.

The develop phase has a work-in-progress (WIP) limit of 2. Since each of us can only work on a maximum of one story at a time, this minimizes waste associated with context switching.

We also have some guidelines for story cards:

• We use different colors to indicate classes of work. For example, value-adds for us are green, bugs are orange, and priority fixes are in red. Red stories trump the priority system, and move through our pipeline as fast as possible.
• We prioritize tasks using the Moscow Method: each task is defined as must, should, could, or would, in descending priority.
• We generally don’t estimate story sizes, but this space could be used for story points, hours, or t-shirt sizing (small, medium, and large).

Other ideas for story cards:

• You could use colors to group stories into batches representing their minimally-marketable features (MMF).
• You could use tags to group stories into MMFs, iterations, or due dates.

Every project has an editable details section on its homepage – as you become familiar with Zen and find the best way to use it to work, this is a good place to share the information with the team. This way someone that’s new to the project can understand how the team uses Zen in a quick glance.

We’re interested in the different ways our users have found to work with Zen, so let us know!