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.

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!

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!

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!

We’ve been working hard to make improvements to Zen, and we are very close to launching a website redesign as well as some significant (and most requested) additions to the application.

We’re looking for short testimonials for the new version of our website! If Zen has helped you or your company improve, please let us know by sending your quote to niki@enkari.com.

Please include your name, your company (if applicable), and a link to your company’s website if you would like it included with your quote or testimonial.

Happy Labor Day to our United States users! We’ve been hard at work, and we just pushed an update to the site that improves a few things.

Changes to Editing

We made a few changes to editable fields throughout the application:

1. All fields are now editable by a double-click instead of a single click. This means that text is more easily selectable, and links within editable fields are clickable.
2. Story cards now support Markdown, meaning you can add rich formatting to cards’ display on your board, not just to the details field. Project descriptions now support Markdown as well.
3. You can now edit cards from your board by double-clicking the text! To expand the card (displaying the toolbar), just click the header of the card.

Here’s an example of the Markdown support on story cards:

New Support Portal

We’ve gotten some very positive feedback about our customer support, but email has gotten a little difficult to handle. To improve even more, we’ve launched a new customer support portal. When you click the feedback link inside Zen and send us a message, you’re now creating a new ticket inside our support system. This will help us ensure that every user gets a prompt response to every question or issue.

The support portal is powered by ZenDesk, a great support service. Despite the name similarities, there’s no affiliation between our products except in spirit. :)

Bug Fixes

We’ve also corrected some minor nagging UI issues that users have found.

Work in Progress

We’re working on a few things that we hope to get pushed out this week:

1. The ability to attach files to stories, which is the most-requested feature at the moment!
2. Support for task lists inside of stories.
3. Moving the add stories shade to be horizontal, so you can keep your backlog panel open as you add stories. This will also pave the way for some upgrades to the work screen that we have up our sleeve. :)

Thanks again for your feedback, and please keep it coming!

Last night, we pushed a new version of the site with some updates to our charting system. Originally, snapshots of your projects’ key performance indicators (KPIs) were taken each night, but we found this method of capturing metrics limiting. Instead, the charts are now based on the current data from your projects, collected live when you display the charts.

In addition to the obvious advantage of having your data always be current, the new way of tracking your performance data will allow us to provide drill-down support in the future. For example, you will be able to view historic KPI values for all stories with a given size, color, etc. We’re not ready to roll this out just yet, but it’s on our roadmap, and yesterday’s upgrades will allow it to happen.

We’re working hard to continue to evolve the product to match your feedback, so please keep it coming!

We’re happy to announce that last night, the first piece of the Zen API went live. You can use it to push and pull information between Zen and your own applications. Our plan is to roll the API out in phases, and this first step represents only the beginning of the functionality that the API will provide.

To use the Zen API, you need to generate an API key. This key must be supplied with every request – it’s essentially your password, but only for API requests. You can also optionally enable the Developer Console, which lets you interact with the API in a testing environment.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Go to your dashboard, and click Settings.
2. Choose the Developer tab.
3. Check Enable Developer Console.
4. Click New API Key. Zen will generate and display a new API key. Give it a description (just for your reference).
5. Click Save Changes.
6. Click Dashboard, and you will see the Developer Console link on the navigation bar.

Here’s what the developer tab looks like:

Once you have access to the developer console, head over to the new Zen documentation wiki to learn what requests are available, and how to structure them. The documentation is admittedly a bit messy at the moment, but just as we’re working to improve the API gradually, the documentation will also improve over time. :)

For a limited time, the API is open to all users (including those with free accounts), but eventually it will be restricted to paid accounts only.

So, go start tinkering! As always, we’re very interested in any feedback that you have. Please let us know if you have ideas for improving the API, and of course, if you use it to build something cool, we’d like to know that as well!