As I work to support teams evaluating TargetProcess I’ve noted there are several typical flows people take to make their selection of an agile project management tool.  There they are:

1. 5-users community free pack. As we issued this edition a year ago, our primary goal was to contribute to the growing agile community and give our share of input to the spread of agile methodologies. We thought the free 5-users pack will be used only by small agile teams. As it turned out, this is not the case. Quite often some eminent companies start their evaluation of TargetProcess with 5-users free pack (maybe they want to hide their identity and avoid being chased for the purchase decision The free edition is great, it comes with all the upgrades and updates - but it’s only for 5 users! If your team is a lot larger, then it might make sense to get right on to the …

2. 30-days on-site trial.  With 30-days trials you can have as large an evaluation team as you want.  By default it’s 10 users, but the trial can be updated to accommodate unlimited users (let me know if you want the update).

3. 30-days on-demand trial. The easiest way to get down to TargetProcess evaluation real fast. No set up, no installation. The trial starts same instant as your sign-up request is accepted. The  flexibility to allow as many users as needed for the trial is there as well.

4. Personal online demo.  Perhaps we haven’t announced that loud enough previously, but what we do  - we provide personal 1- hour online demos of TargetProcess FOR FREE. Personal online demo does not mean that you will sit and watch TargetProcess webcast by yourself - this is a scheduled personal meeting with a TargetProcess product specialist, usually done in GoTo meeting or WebEx. You look at TargetProcess real time on a shared web screen and  the product specialist gives you a guided tour answering your questions.

There’s one more way of evaluation. Most hated by me. It’s when people pick up several  agile project management tools and send their Excel questionnaires to fill in.  Grrr. I must admit that from the first sight this option looks like the most focused and fast for making a quick selection. And it really might be so BUT … for the very first round of selection. You can’t really rely on Excel sheets as an ultimate decision-making aide, and here’s why:  you have your own development process and names for the features you need, and in TargetProcess there’re some other names and features to do the same.  So once a questionnaire comes in, sometimes it’d take more time to exchange questions and answers to understand the essence of what actually people want to get from the tool. It’s basically about giving different names to one and the same thing, as in languages - different words are used in different languages to designate one and the same notion/concept.

That’s why, as in real life, we recommend to “touch and feel” the tool, to play with it and see how it works before taking any final decision.  This stands true not only for TargetProcess, but for any agile project management (or any other) software tools.

What’s your experience of evaluating agile project management tools? What are your best practices?

You may download new theme from:

http://www.targetprocess.com/Files/TargetProcessSkin_ext_3.zip

Installation is simple:

1. Put css file and images into your Ext folder
2. Include css:
   
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="[path]/resources/css/ext-all-notheme.css” />
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”[path]/resources/css/xtheme-tp.css” />


Comments, suggestions and bugs are welcome.

Grid Grouping

Window with Tabs

Navigate to Custom Reports and click New Report. Select process and Iteration entity. Then click Fields and select required fields for the report: for example Name, Start Date, End Date. Click Summary Fields tab and create a summary field as below:

Click Settings and specify report name. As a result, you will have a report like this one:

However, sometimes you have complex program with several projects and several development teams. Obviously, it is hard to avoid that all teams will work independently. In some cases a user story from project Alpha will depend on a user story from project Omega. How you may handle that in TargetProcess?

Luckily, there is a powerful Custom Fields concept to serve your needs. For example, you may create “Depends On” custom field for user story and select a user story from the project Omega to show the dependency explicitly.

See how you may setup dependencies management in TargetProcess in 3 minutes (screen cast)

TargetProcess is indeed a very customizable and intuitive product, so with a little bit of time you can learn how to use it without having to pay for extra training. In this post, we will give you a few tips on working with TargetProcess web-site and content for training purposes.

So, you have received your trial license key and installed TargetProcess. Now, go and generate a sample project on our Getting Started page.

Next, go to our Documentation page. User Guide is a must-read. As you browse the User Guide online, be sure to refer to the sample project you generated in the first step to check how TargetProcess works for this or that functional feature. Make notes of questions on the way - you’re welcome to contact us with questions. But we encourage you to find the answers yourself. The more you do it by yourself, the faster you learn how to use TargetProcess.

Our Video page and Usage Patterns page is a great aide for DIY’s, as well as Quick Tour page (IMPORTANT: be sure to click through all the links on the left, not only the screenshots!)

If you need any help with training or if you want TargetProcess best usage tip for your particular business case, contact us by email or use other communication channels listed on TargetProcess Support page.

Your comments on what else can we do to improve your TargetProcess training experience are welcome.

Suppose, you’re planning a project. You need to calculate the efforts and costs for QA, implementation, deployment to production, post production support etc. Each user story has all these stages, but they intertwine without following each other linearly (read more on the benefits of feature-based development vs. stage-based development )

To track these activities/stages across an iteration or a release, you can create tasks within a user story, like here:

You can create custom report that will calculate total time for Specification, Development, Testing, Test Cases across iteration. Here’s how:

And here’s the report:

Time reports can be used for cost calculations based on an hourly rate.

You’re welcome to comment and contact us with questions about your particular custom reporting case.

There are two such workstations in “Core Team” room. So far folks like them

Better Permissions

Sometimes you need to restrict permissions on People. For example, you don’t want to allow a customer see other customers in People area. Now it is possible via Role concept. Just create new role and disable access to People area.

Improved Builds Management

Build was quite restricted entity in TargetProcess. Now it has power behind. You may create custom fields for builds, add comments and attachments, search for builds, etc.

Also Build View has two new tabs:

• Working Items. Contains all stories, bugs and tasks that were completed in this build.
• Source. Contains all source code associated with stories/tasks/bugs in this build.

Assign Tasks Quickly

Some usability improvements were added to the quick assign control. Now you may quickly assign story or task to yourself. If you need to assign it to someone else, grouping by Roles help to find required person.

Install soap4r

First thing you need to install soap4r. SOAP4R is a Ruby library for accessing Web Services via SOAP.

gem install soap4r --include-dependencies

Generate Classes From WSDL

For example, you want to use ProjectService API. You have to generate some classes using wsdl2ruby.

[path_to_wdsl2ruby]wsdl2ruby.rb –wsdl [targetprocess_url]/Services/ProjectService.asmx?WSDL –type client

Real command may look like:

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/soap4r-1.5.8/bin/wsdl2ruby.rb –wsdl http://localhost/targetprocess2/Services/ProjectService.asmx?WSDL –type client

This command will generate 4 classes. You may rename them if you want, in this example we use them as is.

default.rb
defaultDriver.rb
defaultMappingRegistry.rb
ProjectServiceClient.rb

Authentication

TargetProcess uses WSE, so it is required to provide correct authentication. First, create the following class in wsse_authentication.rb file in lib folder. Specify correct login and password. You may use System User credentials (login into TargetProcess and navigate to Admin section to set them).

require 'soap/header/simplehandler'

class WsseAuthHeader < SOAP::Header::SimpleHandler
  NAMESPACE = 'http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd'
  USERNAME  = 'admin'
  PASSWORD  = 'admin_password'

  def initialize()
    super(XSD::QName.new(NAMESPACE, 'Security'))
  end

  def on_simple_outbound
    {"UsernameToken" => {"Username" => USERNAME, "Password" => PASSWORD}}
  end
end

Usage

Let’s assume you have DashboardController in your application and want to show specific project name. Here is the code that will extract project name via web services.

require "defaultDriver.rb"
require 'wsse_authentication.rb'

class DashboardController < ApplicationController
  def index
    driver = ProjectServiceSoap.new     

    #Add authentication
    driver.headerhandler << WsseAuthHeader.new()
    # Print project name
    project = driver.getByID(:id => 2)
    @project_name = project.getByIDResult.name
  end
end