Today we released the integration of AgileZen and GitHub, a collaborative code repository. This means that teams that use both tools can now associate their commit messages in GitHub with story cards in AgileZen! To get started, check out our help article with detailed instructions. Once everything is set up, users can comment in their GitHub messages with story card numbers in AgileZen and the commit messages will appear under the changeset list on the story card. We thought it would be useful to have visibility into commits as part of AgileZen, since the product serves as an information radiator for customers.

We love GitHub and we’re looking forward to using the integration on our team!

Today we released the integration of AgileZen with Campfire, a web app for real time group collaboration. Like our HipChat integration, Campfire can be used to see notifications about the status of work items, so you can get updates about AgileZen story cards along with your chat. This means that even if you don’t have your AgileZen project open, you’ll still be up on the latest information!

This is a project-based notification system (as opposed to email and IM notifications, which are user-specific), so you can associate messages in a certain AgileZen project with a specific room in Campfire. If you’re the account owner, you’ll see the new integrations tab on the home screen of your projects. All you need is your Campfire User API Auth Token and the Campfire Room URL to get started. It’s really easy to set up, and the full instructions are available on our help site.

Many of our customers have posted integrations they’ve written to the API forum on our help site, so be sure to check those out too. If you’ve written integrations with AgileZen or would like to, let us know because we’d love to see them!

Today we released the integration of AgileZen with HipChat, a private group chat and IM client for businesses that has features like file sharing, video and voice chat, and cool emoticons. This integration allows HipChat to be used as another stream for notifications about work items. What this means for you is that you can get updates about story cards along with your chat if you’re using both tools. Even if you don’t have your AgileZen project open, you’ll still be up on the latest information!

This is a project-based notification system (as opposed to email and IM notifications, which are user-specific), so you can associate messages in a certain AgileZen project with a team room in HipChat. If you’re the account owner, you’ll see the new integrations tab on the home screen of your projects. All you need is your HipChat Auth Token and the Name or ID of the room you use for chat to get started. It’s really easy to set up, and the full instructions are available on our help site.

While this is our first integration, many of our customers have posted integrations they’ve written to the API forum on our help site. We have a lot of integrations planned for the future, but we started with this one for a few reasons. First, we use HipChat and we love it. We also use the GitHub/HipChat integration and have found it very useful for visibility in to what’s being committed. Our friends over at Adzerk use both AgileZen for project management and HipChat for team communication and thought it would be useful if they could have information about their work items from AgileZen posted to HipChat. We thought that this would also be really useful for us too, so Nate started working on a proof of concept for Freeform Friday, our version of hack days.

For the proof of concept, Nate created the AgileZen “cash register”, so that every time a customer buys an account, it posts that information to the chat. It’s a great way for everyone to have visibility into the number of new customers, and it’s definitely a motivator to see all the new sales as they come in. Now that we’ve been using this for a while, it was time to take Nate’s hack project and make it into a customer-facing feature. With a few tweaks, we created the integration of AgileZen and HipChat.

We’ve also released the source of the node.js HipChat library that drives the integration. It’s pretty simple, and just does what we need it to do. (Pull requests are appreciated if you’d like to add features!)

If you’ve written integrations with AgileZen or would like to, let us know because we’d love to see them!

We just released an update to the notification system in AgileZen, which includes a new format for emails. These notifications now provides more story information like color and tags!

We also added notifications for attachments, so you can download files by clicking on the links in the email or instant message.

Along with these changes, we’ve continued to make improvements to the backend to provide a better customer experience. We’re now able to deploy new features faster and without downtime!

If you are interested in our experience moving to Amazon for our infrastructure or the specifics of this notification release, we’ll be posting about them soon.

Last Saturday, we released a new version of AgileZen that included, among other things, a completed version of our REST API. Things didn’t go as well as we planned, and now that we’ve had time to reflect on things, we wanted to talk about what worked and what didn’t. We don’t usually post about problems on our blog, but we felt like it was important to be open about what happened so that our current and future customers can understand what we learned and what we’ll change going forward.

First off, the completed version of the API had some breaking changes, and we shipped it without giving our users advance notice of the changes. We did this with the assumption that the changes were limited enough that users could easily update any software that they’d built. This was a bad move by us, because even the smallest change can still break even the simplest integration.

We know people rely on our service and we don’t take that responsibility lightly. Not only do we offer our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience we caused, but we want people to know that in the future, we’ll do better to communicate any issues that might have an adverse impact on customers. As far as the API goes, we’ll be sure to maintain backwards compatibility from this point forward. If we make major changes, we’ll use our URL versioning scheme to provide support for both versions.

We also made the mistake of batching together software updates with improvements to our infrastructure in the hopes of minimizing interruptions of service. When we published the new version of AgileZen, we moved from .NET 3.5 to .NET 4, upgraded several libraries that we rely on in our software, and applied several patches to the server for security purposes. Since we made so many changes, when we discovered bugs, it was much more difficult for us to determine the root cause of the problems. Though our underlying intentions were good, we’ll try to avoid large batches that include both infrastructure and feature work in the future.

This week we also encountered some very strange problems with our authentication scheme, which we were unable to reproduce outside of production. Specifically, sometimes Forms authentication tickets for users of Safari were issued and then immediately revoked, causing the users to be stuck on the log-in page. Our best guess is that this was related to our move to the new version of .NET, but we weren’t able to determine a definitive root cause. Instead, we re-built our authentication scheme over the last couple of days to avoid the issue.

In the middle of all of this, on Tuesday, an issue occurred with our hosting service’s network related to Comcast peering. Our host corrected in very quickly, but AgileZen appeared to be down for between 30-60 minutes in some areas of the United States, including our office in North Carolina.

Needless to say, we haven’t had a great week, and I’m sure we put a kink in a few of our customers’ weeks as well.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that we’ve corrected all known issues and the fixes are in production. Support response time was phenomenal, and we felt that our response loop — receiving indication there was an issue, reproducing it in our development environment, determining the root cause, developing a fix, operationalizing it, staging it for QA, and releasing it to production — was extremely efficient. We’re proud of the way the team came together to work the problem. While we’d obviously like to avoid shipping bugs in the first place, once they’re in production the next best thing we can do is correct them quickly.

We also received quite a bit of feedback about our API. One request we received was the ability to request a specific content format without having to use HTTP headers. As a result, you can now specify a content format (XML or JSON) by appending an extension on URLs when you make requests to the REST API. More information on this feature is available on our developer site.

The elapsed time between when we received this request until the feature was released into production was less than 24 hours. We’re proud of the fact that we were able to respond to great feature requests from customers in amongst fixing high-priority defects.

Lastly, the whole team wanted to say thank you to our users for bearing with us when we experience problems like this, and a special thank you in particular to customers who provided detailed descriptions of issues to us to help diagnose the defects. If you have questions or comments, we’d be happy to work with you, so please email us at support@agilezen.com.

As you may have noticed, we pushed a new version of AgileZen over the weekend that, among a few infrastructure improvements and bug fixes, included a beta version of our completed REST API! The first version of the API was read-only and although intended to add write access soon after, other feature work kept taking priority. We’re very happy with the results of our work, and we’re planning to move the actual AgileZen app over to the new API once we complete our UI re-tooling effort.

More information on the new API is available on our new developer site. If you used the previous version of the API, there are a few breaking changes to be aware of:

1. The URL scheme has been changed to be less confusing. Originally, URL segments like projects became project (singular) when referring to a single resource. To avoid confusion, all segments are now always plural.
2. The default response format is now JSON instead of XML.
3. To protect API keys in transit, all requests to the API must be done via HTTPS. This will work even if your account’s plan doesn’t include SSL support.
4. The blocked and ready properties in stories have been replaced with a status enumeration.

Since the previous version of the API was read-only and pretty rough around the edges, we didn’t think it was a good idea to carry forward support for it. We’re sorry if this causes trouble with anything you’ve built! However, the new API is essentially feature-complete, so we plan to honor backwards-compatibility, and will version and deprecate if we make any major changes.

Another thing to note about the new version of the API is that the way access is granted has changed. Before, there were two permissions called Read via API and Write via API. We’ve replaced those permissions with an access level which can be one of four values: None, Read, Read/Write, or Admin. Most of these are relatively self-explanatory, with the exception of Admin, which allows users to rename projects, edit project membership, change permissions, and generally do anything a project owner or administrator would be able to do.

All users were granted Read access to the projects they’re involved in, but to be able to write data to the API, you will need to change their access level. The access level that is required for each endpoint is documented on our developer site.

We’d love some feedback on the API, so please hack on it and let us know if you run in to any issues. We’d also love to know if you’re building something cool with the API, so if you’d like to share something, post a comment here, send us a message on Twitter, or send us an email!

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.

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.

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.