v.2.19 - New Navigation, No Actors, Bug Pain

All the features described below appeared in TargetProcess v.2.19 (Mar-09)

• Customizable Navigation
• Actors and Roles Merge
• Bug Pain Plugin
• Other Improvements

Customizable Navigation

Problems: Navigation in TargetProcesss is too complex. I hate to make several clicks to reach required page.

Solution: Make the navigation as flat as possible and enforce 2-clicks rule.

There are many areas in TargetProcess, but often one particular person needs about 7 areas daily. Solution looks pretty obvious — make navigation as flat as possible with an ability to customize it for every person.

Now you can access your top areas with a single click from any place. And all other areas can be accessed with 2-3 clicks. But since they are quite rare, it is not a big deal to get through.

Actors and Roles Merge

Problem: "What is the difference between Actor and Role? What the hell Actor is?".

Solution: Get rid of Actor and replace it with Role completely.

In previous versions of TargetProcess there were two different entities: Roles and Actors. Roles were added for permissions management, while Actors participated in development Workflow setup. However, there is no good reason to have two separate entities for there purposes. It causes a lot of confusion and brings no value.

In this release we got rid of Actor entity and Workflow based on Roles now.

Bug Pain Plugin

Problem: It is hard to prioritize bugs.

Solution: Introduce bug pain concept and create a plugin that will support it.

Bug Pain concept takes into consideration three important factors of a bug: Severity, Visibility (how many users are likely to spot bug and how soon) and Class (relevance of bug in the context of product development strategy).

Bug Pain plugin uses custom fields to store all that information and calculates a bug pain value. It is relatvely easy to say that bug with pain 67 has more priority than bug with pain 25. It is much more simpler to spot important bugs and plan them accordingly.

Other Improvements