Greetings!

I’m Jayme Davis, the technical lead on the AgileZen team. I wanted to share some of the plans here at AgileZen about where we are going in the future, and how we are getting there.

The Old AgileZen

I know many of you love this product. We love it too, and you’re welcome to continue using it. We’ll continue to fix bugs and make minor enhancements, but hopefully it’s obvious by now that our primary focus is the new AgileZen which we believe will take our product to the next level being fully real-time. Our goal is to migrate all of our old customers to the new AgileZen. Let us know what features are missing or what is stopping you from migrating to the new AgileZen.

The New AgileZen

Thank you also to all of our customers who are trying the new AgileZen. Our team is entirely focused on developing and improving the new AgileZen. We are slowly but surely migrating users to the new system. The new AgileZen has many benefits over the old application. There are real-time updates for working closely with your team and an iPad app that works in real-time with the web.  About the iPad App, since it’s release in January we’ve had over 1000 downloads representing more than a third of the beta users.  If you haven’t tried this out, I’d encourage you to….you can click here.

Is the new AgileZen perfect? Nope. Do we want it to be? Yep. We have recently switched gears to a new process that will involve heavy testing, improving quality, dramatic UI enhancements, and continuous delivery. If the new AgileZen is not ready for you at this time, that’s ok.

I personally take your feedback very seriously. I enjoy writing software and enjoy hearing feedback about what users like and don’t like about our software. Please feel free to bombard us with feedback (click the little question mark in the top right of the new AgileZen) or email me directly at jdavis@rallydev.com. Send a tweet to @agilezen or me personally at @jaymed if you prefer that as well. All feedback is welcome.

There are many other process improvements and changes coming soon. More about this on future posts!

Jayme

Last Thursday we announced support for public boards and UI updates to the beta AgileZen. Below are the important UI changes that were introduced:

Minimized Header

A major goal of our product redesign was to simplify and beautify the AgileZen interface and experience. Our latest iteration focused on getting us closer to that goal. The minimized, simplified header is a way to keep the view clean by displaying only what is 100% necessary.

The header content is fairly self-explanatory, with the major nuance being the new menu toggle button (top left hand corner in the above image). This button allows you to toggle between displaying and hiding the column containing the menu and activity stream. Here is a view of the button in its “on” state, with the menu column showing:

In addition, we received feedback that the iconography was confusing, so we added corresponding text to each menu item.

Fully-Collapsable Menu and Activity Stream

As shown above, the menu and activity stream are now 100% collapsable. In the previous UI, the activity stream was, at its very minimal, an icon-heavy view that was not as utilitarian as we would have otherwise hoped. The new activity stream is fully collapsable for a more compact, beautiful board view (we’ll get to that in a moment), and was made easier to read with the light-on-dark contrast scheme. This was done in order to make it obvious that the board and activity stream column are separate entities.

Moving the menu to the same column allowed us to further simplify the header and allow for easier navigation throughout the application. The collapsable menu persists over all views, including the “Planning” and “Settings” screens.

Updated Focus Panel

The changes to our focus panel were less extreme and obvious than those made to the header, menu, and activity stream. Our main focus in updating the focus panel’s UI was to make the entire system more intuitive and user-friendly. The view itself is cleaner than the previous iteration, while maintaining the essential functionality of interacting with individual card items.

Support for Public Boards

Public Boards allow you to share a read-only copy of our AgileZen board with anyone with an internet connection. On the “Basics” tab of the “Settings Screen”, you now have the ability to set your board as “Public”, which in turn gives you the project URL which can be shared with anyone, regardless of whether they have an AgileZen account or not.

These Public Boards help us on our way supporting Rally for Impact, a foundation dedicated to offering assistance to non-profits, citizen engineers, students, and open-source collaborators.

Today we released the integration of AgileZen and GitHub, a collaborative code repository. This means that teams that use both tools can now associate their commit messages in GitHub with story cards in AgileZen! To get started, check out our help article with detailed instructions. Once everything is set up, users can comment in their GitHub messages with story card numbers in AgileZen and the commit messages will appear under the changeset list on the story card. We thought it would be useful to have visibility into commits as part of AgileZen, since the product serves as an information radiator for customers.

We love GitHub and we’re looking forward to using the integration on our team!

Today we released the integration of AgileZen with Campfire, a web app for real time group collaboration. Like our HipChat integration, Campfire can be used to see notifications about the status of work items, so you can get updates about AgileZen story cards along with your chat. This means that even if you don’t have your AgileZen project open, you’ll still be up on the latest information!

This is a project-based notification system (as opposed to email and IM notifications, which are user-specific), so you can associate messages in a certain AgileZen project with a specific room in Campfire. If you’re the account owner, you’ll see the new integrations tab on the home screen of your projects. All you need is your Campfire User API Auth Token and the Campfire Room URL to get started. It’s really easy to set up, and the full instructions are available on our help site.

Many of our customers have posted integrations they’ve written to the API forum on our help site, so be sure to check those out too. If you’ve written integrations with AgileZen or would like to, let us know because we’d love to see them!

Today we released the integration of AgileZen with HipChat, a private group chat and IM client for businesses that has features like file sharing, video and voice chat, and cool emoticons. This integration allows HipChat to be used as another stream for notifications about work items. What this means for you is that you can get updates about story cards along with your chat if you’re using both tools. Even if you don’t have your AgileZen project open, you’ll still be up on the latest information!

This is a project-based notification system (as opposed to email and IM notifications, which are user-specific), so you can associate messages in a certain AgileZen project with a team room in HipChat. If you’re the account owner, you’ll see the new integrations tab on the home screen of your projects. All you need is your HipChat Auth Token and the Name or ID of the room you use for chat to get started. It’s really easy to set up, and the full instructions are available on our help site.

While this is our first integration, many of our customers have posted integrations they’ve written to the API forum on our help site. We have a lot of integrations planned for the future, but we started with this one for a few reasons. First, we use HipChat and we love it. We also use the GitHub/HipChat integration and have found it very useful for visibility in to what’s being committed. Our friends over at Adzerk use both AgileZen for project management and HipChat for team communication and thought it would be useful if they could have information about their work items from AgileZen posted to HipChat. We thought that this would also be really useful for us too, so Nate started working on a proof of concept for Freeform Friday, our version of hack days.

For the proof of concept, Nate created the AgileZen “cash register”, so that every time a customer buys an account, it posts that information to the chat. It’s a great way for everyone to have visibility into the number of new customers, and it’s definitely a motivator to see all the new sales as they come in. Now that we’ve been using this for a while, it was time to take Nate’s hack project and make it into a customer-facing feature. With a few tweaks, we created the integration of AgileZen and HipChat.

We’ve also released the source of the node.js HipChat library that drives the integration. It’s pretty simple, and just does what we need it to do. (Pull requests are appreciated if you’d like to add features!)

If you’ve written integrations with AgileZen or would like to, let us know because we’d love to see them!

As you’ve no doubt noticed (since you’re here), we’ve launched a new blog. Product updates will still be posted on our product blog, but this site will be a place for all of our team members to post on various topics that are either too technical, or otherwise don’t fit on our product blog.

We just released an update to the notification system in AgileZen, which includes a new format for emails. These notifications now provides more story information like color and tags!

We also added notifications for attachments, so you can download files by clicking on the links in the email or instant message.

Along with these changes, we’ve continued to make improvements to the backend to provide a better customer experience. We’re now able to deploy new features faster and without downtime!

If you are interested in our experience moving to Amazon for our infrastructure or the specifics of this notification release, we’ll be posting about them soon.

AgileZen will be offline for two hours this Saturday, July 16th from 8 – 10 am ET (12 – 2 pm GMT). We picked this time to minimize the impact on our customers, but we realize that it will be an inconvenience to some and apologize in advance for this.

Once we’re back online, we’ll be on our awesome new infrastructure! There will be more detail about this posted here in the coming weeks.

We’ll be tweeting our progress, so please feel free to follow us, if you’d like the play-by-play. If you have issues or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us: support@agilezen.com.

Thanks for using AgileZen and for your understanding!

Last Saturday, we released a new version of AgileZen that included, among other things, a completed version of our REST API. Things didn’t go as well as we planned, and now that we’ve had time to reflect on things, we wanted to talk about what worked and what didn’t. We don’t usually post about problems on our blog, but we felt like it was important to be open about what happened so that our current and future customers can understand what we learned and what we’ll change going forward.

First off, the completed version of the API had some breaking changes, and we shipped it without giving our users advance notice of the changes. We did this with the assumption that the changes were limited enough that users could easily update any software that they’d built. This was a bad move by us, because even the smallest change can still break even the simplest integration.

We know people rely on our service and we don’t take that responsibility lightly. Not only do we offer our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience we caused, but we want people to know that in the future, we’ll do better to communicate any issues that might have an adverse impact on customers. As far as the API goes, we’ll be sure to maintain backwards compatibility from this point forward. If we make major changes, we’ll use our URL versioning scheme to provide support for both versions.

We also made the mistake of batching together software updates with improvements to our infrastructure in the hopes of minimizing interruptions of service. When we published the new version of AgileZen, we moved from .NET 3.5 to .NET 4, upgraded several libraries that we rely on in our software, and applied several patches to the server for security purposes. Since we made so many changes, when we discovered bugs, it was much more difficult for us to determine the root cause of the problems. Though our underlying intentions were good, we’ll try to avoid large batches that include both infrastructure and feature work in the future.

This week we also encountered some very strange problems with our authentication scheme, which we were unable to reproduce outside of production. Specifically, sometimes Forms authentication tickets for users of Safari were issued and then immediately revoked, causing the users to be stuck on the log-in page. Our best guess is that this was related to our move to the new version of .NET, but we weren’t able to determine a definitive root cause. Instead, we re-built our authentication scheme over the last couple of days to avoid the issue.

In the middle of all of this, on Tuesday, an issue occurred with our hosting service’s network related to Comcast peering. Our host corrected in very quickly, but AgileZen appeared to be down for between 30-60 minutes in some areas of the United States, including our office in North Carolina.

Needless to say, we haven’t had a great week, and I’m sure we put a kink in a few of our customers’ weeks as well.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that we’ve corrected all known issues and the fixes are in production. Support response time was phenomenal, and we felt that our response loop — receiving indication there was an issue, reproducing it in our development environment, determining the root cause, developing a fix, operationalizing it, staging it for QA, and releasing it to production — was extremely efficient. We’re proud of the way the team came together to work the problem. While we’d obviously like to avoid shipping bugs in the first place, once they’re in production the next best thing we can do is correct them quickly.

We also received quite a bit of feedback about our API. One request we received was the ability to request a specific content format without having to use HTTP headers. As a result, you can now specify a content format (XML or JSON) by appending an extension on URLs when you make requests to the REST API. More information on this feature is available on our developer site.

The elapsed time between when we received this request until the feature was released into production was less than 24 hours. We’re proud of the fact that we were able to respond to great feature requests from customers in amongst fixing high-priority defects.

Lastly, the whole team wanted to say thank you to our users for bearing with us when we experience problems like this, and a special thank you in particular to customers who provided detailed descriptions of issues to us to help diagnose the defects. If you have questions or comments, we’d be happy to work with you, so please email us at support@agilezen.com.

As you may have noticed, we pushed a new version of AgileZen over the weekend that, among a few infrastructure improvements and bug fixes, included a beta version of our completed REST API! The first version of the API was read-only and although intended to add write access soon after, other feature work kept taking priority. We’re very happy with the results of our work, and we’re planning to move the actual AgileZen app over to the new API once we complete our UI re-tooling effort.

More information on the new API is available on our new developer site. If you used the previous version of the API, there are a few breaking changes to be aware of:

1. The URL scheme has been changed to be less confusing. Originally, URL segments like projects became project (singular) when referring to a single resource. To avoid confusion, all segments are now always plural.
2. The default response format is now JSON instead of XML.
3. To protect API keys in transit, all requests to the API must be done via HTTPS. This will work even if your account’s plan doesn’t include SSL support.
4. The blocked and ready properties in stories have been replaced with a status enumeration.

Since the previous version of the API was read-only and pretty rough around the edges, we didn’t think it was a good idea to carry forward support for it. We’re sorry if this causes trouble with anything you’ve built! However, the new API is essentially feature-complete, so we plan to honor backwards-compatibility, and will version and deprecate if we make any major changes.

Another thing to note about the new version of the API is that the way access is granted has changed. Before, there were two permissions called Read via API and Write via API. We’ve replaced those permissions with an access level which can be one of four values: None, Read, Read/Write, or Admin. Most of these are relatively self-explanatory, with the exception of Admin, which allows users to rename projects, edit project membership, change permissions, and generally do anything a project owner or administrator would be able to do.

All users were granted Read access to the projects they’re involved in, but to be able to write data to the API, you will need to change their access level. The access level that is required for each endpoint is documented on our developer site.

We’d love some feedback on the API, so please hack on it and let us know if you run in to any issues. We’d also love to know if you’re building something cool with the API, so if you’d like to share something, post a comment here, send us a message on Twitter, or send us an email!