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.

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.

Last Friday the Rally office in Raleigh moved to a new location. We’re mostly settled in, so I thought I would share pictures of the new home for the AgileZen team. You can see in the pictures that Nate is working hard on new features for the product. There’s also plenty of room in the new space to add to our team, which we’re very excited about. More news on that soon!

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.

When we launched AgileZen, we were looking to create a simple tool that had the flexibility to be applied to many different situations. Since that time, we’ve had the pleasure of talking with people who use AgileZen in unique ways, far beyond what we could have imagined. We’ve heard stories from lawyers who have embraced kanban to manage their work and individuals who have been using personal kanban as a way to organize their lives, just to name a few. We’re always interested in learning more about how our customers are using the tool, especially those who are using AgileZen outside of software development, but we wanted to officially ask for your insights.

If you are using AgileZen in a unique way and would be willing to chat with us via email or phone, we would love to hear from you! You can send an email to niki.kohari@rallydev.com and I’ll follow up. Thanks in advance and we look forward to hearing your stories.

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!