As many readers of my blog have come to know, for the past couple of years, I’ve been extremely impressed by Apple, both in hardware and software. They simply make the best hardware on the planet and while everybody seems to think their hardware is “overpriced” nobody comes remotely close to Apple’s prices when they attempt to make similar quality products. Likewise, Apple’s software has been top notch. After being a Windows user for more than 17 years, I made the switch to OS X about 18 months ago. Since then, I’ve been floored by how smoothly OS X handles everything. Things run noticeably better than XP or Vista. Everything from simple animations, to switching between programs, to connecting a projector or 2nd monitor, to managing 20 open windows and playing audio/video files. When it comes to home-productivity software, such as Photo and Movie management, nothing comes remotely close to iLife, which is included free with every Mac.

But there is an area where Apple falls short in a significant way. With Axosoft now having experience developing for Windows, Web and iPhone, I can authoritatively say that Apple’s developer platfrom has some major shortcomings. While X-Code and Objective-C provide a reasonable environment for creating OS X and iPhone apps, Apple has virtually no tools for web development and largely relies on the open source (LAMP) world for web-based apps on its platform. That is a big surprise considering NeXT’s WebObjects was considered one of the premier web development tools when Apple purchased NeXT. In fact, back in 1996 when Apple bought NeXT, Dell operated it’s ecommerce site, Dell.com, using Apple’s WebObjects development platform, something Apple seems to have abandoned. But it gets even worse. Objective-C is an extremely verbose language which forces software developers to worry about a lot more things that modern languages, such as Java and C#, automatically take care of for developers. Memory management is tedious and frustrating, especially for those who come from a modern language background. And if you want to develop a database driven application, fo-get ’bout it! Apple’s Core Data APIs are designed for single-user local data storage. There is no Apple-based APIs for interacting with any client-server database systems like MySQL, SQL Server or Oracle.

Right now, Microsoft’s exceptional development tools is the best thing it has going for it. From top-notch integrated development environment (Visual Studio) to modern development languages (C#), to a great Web development story (ASP.NET, web services, IIS) and database development (SQL Server & APIs to access other systems). Microsoft is still the only company with the complete development package. Using Visual Studio and .NET APIs you can build desktop apps, web apps, database driven apps (regardless of which DB system you connect to) and web services. This development advantage is the biggest thing that is keeping Microsoft very relavent and in the game at a time when most of the product innovations are coming from Apple and Google.

With Windows 7 addressing much of the minor usability problems that plagued XP and Vista, Microsoft is still in a pretty good position. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about Dell, HP or other WinPC hardware makers, as it still makes more sense to buy a Mac, even if you plan to run Windows. And while Microsoft is in a pretty good position for now, they still have to remain paranoid, because you never know if somebody in one of those super-secret rooms at 1 Infinite Loop might be working to complete Apple’s development story. After all, the iPhone caught everybody by surprise!

It’s exciting to see the tech industry dominated by 3 major players now, each giving the others lots of reasons to stay on their toes. If it wasn’t for OS X, we’d all be stuck with Vista for another 5 years.

In The Developer’s Incentive to ship, I talk about how at my company, Axosoft, we drive and motivate our software engineers to ship software. Besides the standards of a good work environment, free snacks, drinks and state-of-the-art equipment, we also do something that’s a bit out of the ordinary: After every major release of our flagship software, OnTime, we take 30 days to do fun side projects — preferably ones that are challenging.

So when we released OnTime 2009 in the first week of January, our dev team was anxious to get going on their side projects. In our first side-project meeting, three of our developers decided that they wanted to do iPhone Apps. Now keep in mind that our developers are Windows .NET developers with zero Mac development experience. Prior to my awakening, which I detailed in Every Developer’s Next Machine Should be a Mac, none of our developers had much exposure to Macs or OS X.

As we sat around the conference room trying to figure out how to best learn the awkward XCode IDE and the mind boggling Objective C syntax while at the same time learning the Cocoa framework and the iPhone SDK, we came up with a series of basic projects to help the team learn how to draw on the iPhone or record a touch or multi-touch from the screen. We also wanted to learn how to use the accelerometer for movement and animating objects on the screen. We set a goal of 1 week for having something that could demonstrate these basic fundamentals.

This is where having super-star developers on your team makes a big difference…

Within 24 hours our offices were lit up with discussions and demos of iPhone apps that shot bullets and had flying airplanes dropping bombs. Before long, the guys had freshened up on their math skills, figured out collision detection and were building frameworks for Artificial Intelligence. Within 1 week of our start, we now had the confidence to set some serious goals.

We decided we wanted to have at least one iPhone game in the App Store before the end of our 30-day project.

But, just three weeks into our iPhone app development, we had already submitted two full-fledged games to the App Store. These games are relatively basic, but are super FUN, have multiple levels, lots of scenery, artwork and music. The collection of everything that went into making these games totally blew us away.

Here are some screenshots of the two games:

Slug Bug, our First iPhone Game: iTunes Link ($0.99)

Slug Bug – This is a game where the player can take the familiar Axosoft Ladybug across a busy road, a lawn or a train station to get her to safety. It’s a fun little game, especially for youngsters. My 3-year-old loves it and I have a few friends who are old-school Frogger fans that love this game.

Snakes on a Plain, our Second iPhone Game: iTunes Link ($0.99)

Snakes on a Plain – This is my personal favorite game. It’s like the old snakey games that came on just about all Nokia cell phones for a while there, but the big difference is that there is an enemy snake (or two on Hard levels).  Its AI is pretty damn smart and fights for your food. I also love the different patterns and the music in this game.

After releasing two iPhone games in three weeks, we still had a week left for our 30-day side projects, so we decided to have each developer focus on a small game to see what’s possible and use it as an opportunity to learn even more about iPhone development. The three games that came out of that are all available for free from the iPhone App Store:

iScream – iTunes Link (Free)

iScream – This little scare-the-crap-out-of-someone game gets the player to focus on getting a marble from one side of the screen to the other using the iPhone’s (or iPod Touch’s) accelerometer. If the marble falls off the path, the level is restarted. The player is told that after the third level, their mental IQ will be revealed.  While the player is focusing on the task at hand, a scary surprise awaits him on the last turn of the third maze. This game has scared a number of my friends and family members — very satisfying! :-)

Baby Bounce – iTunes Link (Free)

Baby Bounce – In this game, you control a couple of firefighters’ left and right movement with the accelerometer.  They are trying to save babies flying out of burning buildings by catching them in their trampoline. Catch 5 in a row and the babies will bounce twice. Catch 10 in a row and their will be multiple babies.  Catch 15 in a row, and you guessed it, multiple bouncing babies.

Photo Revenge – iTunes Link (Free)

Photo Revenge – Ever want to throw darts or knives at a picture of your nemesis? Well, with Photo Revenge, you pick the picture and determine the size and location of the target on that picture. Then you aim a knife and throw it by flicking your iPhone.  Highly satisfying and no holes in your wall!

One thing you might notice is that these games have pretty decent graphics, music and sound effects. The stars lined up well for us as we involved our graphics and marketing team, who are avid Mac users, to help with the development. With the use of PhotoShop, Flash and GarageBand, we were able to do everything in-house.

So that’s the story of how we shipped five iPhone games in less than 30 days without ever having written a single line of Objective-C or any prior iPhone or Mac development experience. Our only objective was to learn. We never set the expectation for any of these games to make money, but now we know how to write iPhone Apps and that is a huge asset to Axosoft.

Back to work!

You know when you buy a book from Amazon.com and they want to charge you $10 for shipping and you think “damn, that’s a lot of money for shipping”? Well, today, I ordered some books from a local bookstore that gave me the option to pick up my books at the store or they could ship them to me for $10. The store is about a 20 minute drive from me, so my first thought was, “Ship it!” $10 is soooooooo cheap! Not worth my time to get into my car, waste a bunch of gas and an hour of my time for the round-trip to pickup a few books and save $10.

Then it occurred to me the amount of work that goes into having those books shipped. First, a FedEx truck is sent to the bookstore to pickup my books. Then the truck takes it to a warehouse where it’s then sorted and sent via another truck to another warehouse that’s closer to my location. From there, a 3rd truck then takes it and delivers it right to my door. All of this happens while a computer tracks the location of my books and sends me email notifications of major updates and a delivery notice. They do this for just $10 and somehow manage to make enough money to pay for fuel, warehouses, equipment, computers, internet connectivity and the salaries of everybody involved.

Damn, that’s pretty good.

What’s funny is that when I placed orders from Amazon, the same things were happening, but I never thought about it before. It’s weird that ordering from a local bookstore triggered my “bargain” receptors. In fact, when I order from Amazon the items are generally shipped from Washington, which means the process is even more complicated and requires two or three additional truck trips and most likely at least one or two flights to get the books to me.

That’s economies of scale at work and it has absolutely nothing to do with OnTime or the rest of this article. I just thought it was a cool story.

Anyways, with the slumping global economy, we realize that a lot of software development teams might be tightening their belts and might not have enough budget for tools this year. So with the release of OnTime 2009, we have decided to re-price OnTime 2009 Express edition in the following ways:

• OnTime 2009 Express for 5-Users: $395 Now Just $5!
• OnTime 2009 Express Unlimited Users: $2,995 Now Just $995!

The 5-User edition of OnTime Express is practically free! So you might ask, “why not just free?” It’s because we want you to have a tiny bit of skin in the game. When people pay for something, even if the amount paid is nominal, they feel a sense of ownership and commitment. Free means throw-away. If we gave it to you for free, you might let it sit there in your downloads folder and never use it. 60% of our free single-user activation keys never get activated! Paying $5 means you’ll probably be more likely to actually take the time to install and use the product.

In all honesty, the $5 per sale doesn’t even pay for the processing costs of the sale (a human creates an invoice, prints receipts, emails you a key, etc.) and we’ll probably donate the proceeds anyways.

Learn more about OnTime Express and the new $5 Price

“Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong.”
– Oscar Wilde

With that quote setting the proper frame of mind, I’ll dive right in to my list of the Top 5 mainstream tech stories of 2008:

#1: iPhone 3G + App Store

iPhone 3g + App Store

What other device knows where it is (gps), when it’s being touched (touch screen),  how it’s being held (accelerometer), can see (camera), can hear (mic), surfs the web with ease (Safari), plays music (iPod), and makes phone calls? Not many, and arguably, none quite as elegantly as the iPhone 3g.

With a little help from thousands of readily available apps, it plays games, identifies songs, can lull you to sleep with white noise, and will recommend good nearby restaurants.  The damn thing can even fart.

It’s insane (or perhaps perfectly sane) popularity means that millions of people are now walking with pretty hefty networked computer power in their pockets.  Power that gets used.  Over 300,000,000 apps have been downloaded, according to apple — a booming micro-economy within the framework of an overall recession makes the app store’s success even more impressive.

The app store provides developers with instant marketing, merchant services, and distribution.  The overall value of which more than compensates for some of Apple’s quirky, if not downright Draconian, rules and regulations — and their 30% cut.  The hardware + store concept can be seen in gaming consoles, the Kindle, and other devices — but the success of Apple’s implementation is clearly a game changer.  The iPhone app store is the most significant mainstream innovation of 2008.

In 2009, the iPhone looks poised to dominate the mobile gaming market.  Also, instead of a hundred variations of the flashlight app, I expect education and productivity apps to start maturing on the iPhone platform.

#2: Barack Obama

Obama at Google

Does anyone doubt presidential campaigning has been changed forever?  Facebook, Twitter, SMS, candidate web sites, and YouTube have never before been leveraged like they have in 2008.  And, the candidate whose campaign “got it” technologically also got it in the end — as in got the White House.

Tech may not have been the only reason Barack Obama won, but think about what Tech did for Obama:

• raised half of a billion dollars online
• his “Yes We Can” speech has been viewed millions of times, as was the “Yes We Can” music video
• communicated with a younger generation that couldn’t have been reached otherwise
• more twitter followers than any other profile
• and it collected more complete supporter profiles than any other campaign in history, even gaining permission to send them text message updates

Looking ahead, Obama has talked about appointing a Chief Technology Officer for the nation and he appears to be on the side of Net Neutrality. His talk at Google leads one to believe that he has a better understanding of technology than most other elected officials in D.C.

#3: YouTube Goes HD

HD Video on YouTube

YouTube held immense influence when its video resolution was cell phone quality.  But late in 2008, YouTube unleashed HD on the web masses.

So, now we can watch cats falling from bookshelves with clarity like never before, right?  Well, sure.  But it also means more people will start adding computers to their entertainment racks (Mac Minis work great, btw).  At 720p, YouTube videos now look nearly perfect on big LCD TVs.

It also means, businesses will start leveraging YouTube even more.  Recently, we at Axosoft started publishing our weekly video podcast (Fear the Bug) in HD on YouTube.  Now, we can do screen videos that actually have legible text!  Just one year ago, it was nearly impossible to find a web site that could host HD video for a reasonable fee.  Now it’s free, and it just so happens to be where everyone is already going to consume video.

In 2009 and beyond, I expect to see the quantity of high quality content increasing greatly on YouTube.  I’m not holding my breath, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a movie with big names associated to it released straight to YouTube.

YouTube could also be poising itself for a micro-payment model, where users pay small amounts to consume specific chunks of video.  After all, we’re already getting used to that, being the iTunes veterans that hundreds of millions of us already are.

#4: Microsoft Can’t Find its Groove

For Microsoft, 2008 was the year of the low-light.  Think churro, here.  Let’s run down the list:

Jerry Seinfeld - I actually enjoyed the Seinfeld ads.  It probably has something to do with being in my 30’s and suspecting the storyline was actually going somewhere.  The churro, the faux apple-store looking shoe store, the meaninglessness of it all — it was leading up to something, right?  The answer appears to be either “no” or “we’ll never know.”  Microsoft pulled the campaign, seemingly in response to all of the bashing the ads were receiving in the press.  Too bad they didn’t stick with it.

Seinfeld's Churro

I’m a PC – Microsoft boldly decided to fight back against Apple’s “I’m a Mac” campaign with their own “I’m a PC” campaign.  No points for originality there.  The ads were kind of OK.  My boss thought they were good, in fact.  But, ultimately, they were uninspired — designed to steal a meme and not driven by its own passion.  The ads have fizzled, and other than the launch of the campaign, have not been worth talking about.

Surprise! Bill G's a PC.

Project Mohave - To me, this was a big joke and poorly executed.  In the tradition of the old Folgers commercials (we’ve secretly replaced “Fancy Restaurant’s” coffee with Folgers crystals — hey, I already said I was in my 30’s), Microsoft attempted to show us how they could fool people into thinking Vista was a great operating system.

Just check your Vista prejudice in at the door, step into a pristine Microsoft lab with Vista machines set up and monitored by Microsoft engineers and be amazed.  Yeah, ok.  By the way, after debuting as an Adobe Flash-based site, it’s now built on Microsoft Silverlight and has some TV commercials propping it up as well.

Would you believe it's Folgers?

Microhoo - Luckily for Microsoft, Jerry Yang and the folks in charge at Yahoo were way too greedy to let Microsoft ruin itself for a mere $45 Billion.  Today, Yahoo’s market cap is hovering around $17 Billion, and Microsoft isn’t burdened with merging two clashing corporate identities, overlapping products, and countless other distractions.

Z2K9 – In what appears to be a hat-tip to 1999, and with a day left in the year, first-gen Zune 30 gig models around the world choked.  At midnight on Dec 31, the Microsoft mp3 players rebooted and could not get beyond the start-up sequence, rendering them useless.  As if things weren’t already bad enough in the perception department for the capable, yet mostly undesirable, music player — Zune owners had to put up with jabs from their smug iPod-owning friends.  Not a great way to end the year.

Hopefully, Microsoft realizes Apple’s “I’m a Mac” ads haven’t hurt Microsoft nearly as badly as Microsoft have hurt themselves.  They were in full control of the Vista story from the beginning when they chose to release 10 different versions (Ultimate Super-Duper Vista or Mid-Level Media Home Vista or…?), chose to put everyone through the Vista-Ready-Capable fiasco, and chose to force customers through an awful user experience.  Nearly two years later and with a Service Pack under it’s belt, Vista might be the most solid Windows OS ever…but they burned a lot of bridges.

For 2009, I expect Microsoft to do things right with Windows 7 — great coordination with hardware vendors, a solid OS, a pre-holiday release, and strong sales.  However, Microsoft will continue to struggle with being perceived as non-innovative, and they will continue to lose  ground to Apple and Linux.

#5: The Economy Hits Tech … the Layoffs Begin

Big companies are feeling it and laying off:

• Sony – 16,000
• Western Digital – 2,500
• AT&T – 12,000
• Yahoo – 1,500
• Sun Microsystems – 6,000
• Motorola – 3,000
• Ebay – 1,000
• Dell – 8,900
• Nokia – 600

…and several smaller, Web 2.0-ish teams have been affected as well:

• Gawker Media
• Mahalo
• Pandora
• Zillow
• Break.com
• Revision3
• and others…

Whether all of this is due to the housing market, the war, greedy bankers, normal business cycles, mismanagement of the government at nearly all levels, all of the above, or none of the above — times are rough for tech.

Within the space of a few months, we’ve watched the economy collapse, the U.S. congress claw their way to an $800 billion bailout, the fed chairman snap his fingers to print another $800 billion bailout on top of that, and pessimism about the economy grow to an all-time high.  Not even Christmas could bail out the retailers, and lots of folks are holding their breath to see what the post-holiday season holds.

The standard line is that “things will get worse before they get better.”  And, I am in agreement.  In ‘09, I expect to see retail take a hard hit without any bail-out safety nets.  Nearly as soon as he takes office, there will be an Obama-flavored New Deal designed to get people back to work and staying in their homes.  The national debt will skyrocket.  But, with that said, I’m also optimistic about a turn-around in ‘09.  Perhaps not a full recovery, but a reversal of the pendulum.

So, there ya go.

For videos, articles and other resources that are more directly related to Scrum software development, we have just launched a site called AboutScrum.com:

Visit AboutScrum.com 

If you have been following this blog, you already know that Axosoft is embracing SCRUM in a big way. We have adopted SCRUM into our own development efforts and we have also made it a top-priority to have full SCRUM support in OnTime 2009 (due out in Q1 of 2009 and currently in beta).

But as our own customer survey showed, even though SCRUM is the top agile development method, it is in use by only 12% of software development teams. So if SCRUM is so great, why is it not more widely adopted? There are several potential answers to that question:

1. There isn’t a single good source of information on SCRUM.
2. The few videos that do talk about SCRUM are either extremely long, obnoxious, boring or vague. In some cases, all of the above!
3. SCRUM classes are expensive. A two-day class generally runs in the neighborhood of $1800.
4. There is far too much talk and unnecessary debate about chickens, pigs and other minor details!
5. The few sources of information that do exist generally push their own products, tools or services.

With that information in mind, I felt that the software community could use a brief crash-course that covers the core concepts of SCRUM without any product, tools or services being promoted to distract the viewer. So I set out to create a video that would introduce SCRUM in under 10 minutes. It turns out, this is not such an easy task.

The SCRUM Script

I started writing the script in a style that might be familiar to a lot of boring college professors:

A product backlog is a list of features…a sprint is like a milestone…blah blah blah

Even as I wrote the script, I thought the script was bad, but I wanted to get something on paper as a starting point. I then shared the script with one of my partners in crime, Angelo Coppola. He immediately blasted it. He ripped into it calling it “boring”, “vague” and “obnoxious.” Wait a second! Those descriptions sounded vaguely familiar. I already knew what Angelo was telling me: a total re-write had to be done. But before re-writing the script, I went to our conference room white board and I created a storyboard of what I wanted in the visuals:

As you can see, I was meant to be an artist! I must have missed my true calling somewhere along the line. With the new visuals in hand (or I should say in my iPhone), I went back to re-writing the script. I brought in Derek Harju, our resident flash artist at Axosoft, asking him to take my storyboard and bring it to life! Pretty easy, right?

In the new script, I decided to introduce concepts and visuals simultaneously. In a previous video I made on a political topic, the impact of bringing in visuals and words together at the same time seemed to work  well. So the script changed from a boring “a product backlog is blah blah blah…” to something like this:

In SCRUM you work with THESE [show a product backlog], which is then broken down into THESE [show a release backlog]…and so on.

This time, I felt the script was much stronger and Angelo agreed. So it was on to the visuals.

The SCRUM Visuals

Over the next several weeks, Derek went to work to bring the visuals to life. From the beginning, Derek’s work was great. Here are a couple of the earlier samples:

The Team and a Product X Under Development

Illustrating the Product Backlog

The early illustrations were good, but they weren’t great. So with each iteration of the visuals, we would make minor adjustments. I would say “the people are too flat” and Derek would make 3D people, Angelo would say “the box is ugly” and would photoshop a potential box. Then Derek would take it and run with it. Eventually, after countless meetings and having way too many dreams about how to illustrate SCRUM, we were finally down the right path. The end results became this:

Illustrating that Feature Requests for a product can come from anywhere

Illustrating the product owner’s involvement in the product backlog

Showing how a release backlog is broken down into multiple sprints

Showing a burndown chart with burndown velocity and due dates

Daily SCRUM

Derek had done an amazing job with the visuals and animations. By now, Derek was probably having nightmares with my voice and the background music as he was listening to it for 8 hours a day! After he finished the visuals, I wasn’t happy with the script again. There were too many unfunny jokes and minor vocal mistakes in the recording. So I went back to GarageBand, which is an absolutely amazing product, to finalize the audio:

After a bunch of minor tweaks to the script and a few dozen more takes, the audio was finally done. I handed it over to Derek to finalize the Flash.

Making an HD Movie

To our pleasant surprise and complete amazement, a week before we finalized the SCRUM video, YouTube started hosting HD-quality videos at 1280 x 720 resolution. The HD Videos on YouTube were stunning and we wanted to be a part of it! The timing couldn’t have been better as the illustrations in our video look very bad at YouTube’s traditional 320 x 200 resolution. We had worked too hard on this video to let the fuzziness of low-quality video kill it, so we were extremely excited to host it in HD.

After getting the final video from Derek, there were still a couple of minor timing-related issues that Flash was throwing at us during the rendering process. iMovie to the rescue:

With less than 10 minutes of tweaking things in iMovie, the video that we had worked on for nearly 5 weeks was now complete. It was time to upload it to YouTube and wait for the HD quality video to show up.

SCRUM in 10 Minutes in HD

About 2 hours after uploading the video to YouTube, the HD version emerged and it was amazing. To have this video hosted in HD, something that would have been impossible just 1 week before, was an exciting feeling. Here is a link to the end result:

Click Here to Play SCRUM Tutorial Video

Within 2 days of the video being on YouTube, it had already risen to the #1 search result in YouTube for the word “SCRUM” and it has made all sorts of top “honors” lists in YouTube’s Science & Technology category. The reviews so far have been excellent and the feedback via email directly to me has been overwhelmingly positive.

So, there you have it…5 weeks of work by 3 people at Axosoft to make this video and not a single product or service promoted.

I hope you enjoy it and pass it on.

In OnTime V9, one of the most exciting features we are adding is a totally re-written customizable project dashboard that is extremely powerful and flexible.

The new dashboard features include:

• Savable Dashboard Views – As you configure your project dashboard graphs, you can define the number of rows and columns on your dashboard and configure each graph or table that it contains.  Then, you can save the configuration as a view, which can be shared with other users or kept private. This feature makes it extremely easy for project managers to create one or two common dashboard views for their teams.
• New Burn-Down Charts – The new project dashboard now supports burn-down charts. You can add any number of burn-down charts to your dashboard for any product, release or sprint. Burndown charts can be based on hours, days, weeks or even story points.

• New Treemap Charts - The new treemap chart is a unique way of seeing the really big items in a given milestone, release, product or project. In a treemap graph, the size of each item is represented on the chart based on the estimated amount of work that is required for completion. The color of the item indicates how much of that work has already been completed.

• New Chart Customization – Each of the charts in the project dashboard can now be filtered and grouped to show different types of information. So now you can view trend information or user workloads as a pie chart or bar chart. You can group by assignee, status, priority or other fields too.

I simply can’t do the new project dashboard justice with this article. The best way to see the new project dashboard is to watch it in action in this Fear The Bug episode (our weekly OnTime series of Video Tutorials) that covers the new Work Log feature and the Project Dashboard coming in OnTime V9.0:

By the way, these features will be included in OnTime V9 Beta 2, which will be released in about a week.

While OnTime has always been a great tool for tracking projects from inception to release, there has never been a built-in concept for managing specific products, releases and the milestones that go into those releases. Some teams have used the project hierarchy to manage releases, while others have used custom fields to track releases and milestones.

With V9, we are making release management exceptionally easy, and we’re differentiating it from the project hierarchy by introducing a new paradigm for OnTime:

• Releases – The Release Management in OnTime allows for the creation of 3 types of [easily rename-able] release types:
  • Products – A product is the name of the product that has a release cycle. In OnTime, this special type also allows you to associate the product to one or more underlying projects so that OnTime can quickly show users a list of items that are associated with the product. For Scrum teams, this list of items would be the product backlog.
  • Releases – A release would be “V8″, “V8.1″, “2008″ or “Beta 1″.
  • Milestones – A milestone is an incremental checkpoint that teams use to keep themselves on track for a given release. Teams generally have 3 or 4 milestones (and often many more) before each release. For Scrum teams, Milestones are easily renamed to “Sprint” so that each release contains several Sprints.

To get an idea of what a set of releases might look like, take a look at the following screenshot:

Notice that the release hierarchy is a special type of hierarchy in the following ways:

• Milestones are the atomic level release type and while technically we have allowed milestones to contain other milestones, we don’t recommend it.
• Releases can contain other releases or milestones. In the screenshot above, you can see that “2008″ and “2009″ are defined as releases, but each of them contains other releases. Containing other releases is a great way to organize a group of related releases.
• Product is the highest level release-type and can contain other products, releases or milestones. Generally speaking, we don’t expect products to contain other products unless they are part of a suite. To illustrate this, a product defined as “Microsoft Office” could logically contain other products named “Word”, “Excel” and so on. As a best practice, we expect products to always contain at least one or more releases.

By organizing items through this Product -> Release -> Milestone system, team members and project managers can quickly look at the items that pertain to a particular release or milestone for a given product. Visibility into a release is also vastly improved and since each release or milestone has a target completion date, the new Project Dashboard can be used to keep on top of how well work is progressing for a given release.

Important Concepts

There are some important concepts to understand with OnTime’s release management:

• When you define a new product in the releases tab, the product can be associated with one or more projects from your projects hierarchy. This association is only for convenience, so that you can easily select a product and quickly find all the items that are associated with that product, allowing you to quickly assign those items to a given release or milestone.
• Items can only be assigned to 1 product, release or milestone. However, as a best practice, we expect that items (such as defects, features and tasks) will only be assigned to a single Release or Milestone and not to a product.
• To see all the items that are assigned to a given release or milestone, a user would simply click on that release or milestone.
• To assign items to a given release or milestone, users will need to select the underlying product (or “All Releases” and from the list of items in the grid, select the items they want to associate to a release, then use the multi-edit menu to change the release. OnTime Windows users can also drag-and-drop items onto a release to change its release assignment.

Once you have created your Product -> Release -> Milestone hierarchy and assigned items to milestones, you will find that you have significantly improved the visibility into your project schedule.

Release Notes

As a result of the new release management system in OnTime, the commonly dreaded development activity of coming up with a list of “release notes” for a given release is nearly automated. Any user can simply select a release or even the underlying milestone to look at the items associated with that release or milestone. Running an automatically filtered report will also provide a PDF-Ready document that can be shipped as the release notes for a given release or milestone.

Release Management for Scrum Teams

If your team manages projects using Scrum, the first thing you’ll want to do is rename “Milestone” to “Sprint” using the Manage Release Types window (accessed from the Releases Toolbar):

You will then want to create a product the represents your product’s backlog list of items. Inside your product, you’ll have one or more releases, each of which will contain one or more sprints. When you create your sprints, pay special attention to the duration of a sprint as the duration will be used in Burndown charts:

To assign items to a sprint, you simply select the product which contains your entire backlog and assign items to the appropriate sprint using either drag-and-drop (Windows) or Multi-Edit menu (Web or Windows).

Summary

Axosoft customers are accustomed to getting a major new release of OnTime each and every year, and 2009 will be no different. As OnTime V9.0 has started to take shape we are excited to preview some of the new features that are going to make shipping software more manageable than ever for our customers.

For this release, we focused on providing a robust release-planning system along with improved project and schedule visibility. With that in mind, here is a partial list of some of the new features in OnTime V9 Beta 1:

• Release Management – OnTime will now allow software development teams to track products, releases and even the milestones (or sprints) that go into making those releases possible. Release notes will be easier than ever, and product visibility will be largely improved as a result.
• Customizable Project Dashboard – The new project dashboard provides an unprecedented visual representation of all the data inside your OnTime system. With a quick glance, you’ll be able to see a summary of everything that is going on with all of your projects. Scrum teams will be excited to know that the New Project Dashboard also includes Burndown charts.
• Wiki Improvements - The built-in Wiki in OnTime has proven to be an exceptionally valuable tool for software development teams, and with V9 we are adding notifications (for page modifications) and a commenting system.
• Voting – How do you know which features or bugs are most important to your customers? Let them vote on it through the OnTime Customer Portal. Voting is a major new feature in OnTime that will allow teams to quickly prioritize feature and defect lists.
• Lots More Stuff – There are a lot more features in Beta 1, like beefed up Tasks, deep project copy, a redesigned report management system and more. Plus we have even more improvements coming in Beta 2.

Here are the links related to the OnTime V9 Beta 1:

Download Page for OnTime V9 Beta 1

Discussion Forums for OnTime V9 Beta 1

Normally, with the release of a new Beta, I write one blog post where I cover all of the new functionality. However, with V9, I think there is just too much to cover in a single blog post, so I’m going to write several blog posts over the coming days that will each focus on a category of features. Stay tuned or subscribe to the RSS feed (or subscribe via email), so you can see detailed coverage of all the new features that are coming in OnTime 2009.

With the release of Google’s Chrome browser, one question comes to mind:

How is this kind of performance possible?

With browsers now being a 15-year old technology, how is it that a newcomer to the game can radically change the performance of a browser by nearly doubling the normal performance? Google’s achievement with Chrome is absolutely remarkable. It would be similar to a relatively new car company making a sports car that all of a sudden performed at 400 MPH rather than the typical 200 MPH obtained by Ferrari and Lamborghini.

For applications such as Axosoft’s OnTime, Google’s Chrome is heaven-sent. I am absolutely thrilled with the performance of OnTime under the Chrome browser. In generally, nearly ALL operations are twice as fast. Everything from applying a filter to changing a project to adding or editing an item is very noticeably faster with Chrome. This translates to an exceptional user experience. While Chrome is still a V1.0 Beta browser, it has already made it to our list of “must-work-with” browsers for OnTime’s testing.

The above chart provides a short sampling of the amount of time (in seconds) various operations take in OnTime with Internet Explorer 7, FireFox and Chrome (smaller numbers means faster load-time).

My prediction (and a bet with a colleague) is that Google’s Chrome will easily enjoy > 25% market share by the end of 2009. I think that number is actually very conservative.