Change History
Features new in version 2.7
- The dashboard now supports the use of cloud storage services (such as
OneDrive, Google Drive, and DropBox) for team collaboration.
- This is preferred over the previous "shared network directory"
approach, since cloud storage is more readily accessible and more
secure.
- New Team Dashboards can be created in cloud storage, and existing
Team Dashboards can be migrated.
- It is now possible to edit the list of size metrics used by a
project:
- High-maturity software teams can create new size metrics to support
specific planning and tracking goals.
- Teams who work in disciplines other than software can create size
metrics to precisely support their planning and tracking needs.
- Upgrade considerations:
- Upgrading to version 2.7 will not affect current or historical
team projects, which will continue to use the list of size
metrics defined by their metrics collection framework.
- Team projects that are created or relaunched after upgrading will
include support for custom size metrics. To create, rename, or
delete metrics, just choose "Edit Size Metrics" from the WBS
Editor "Workflow" menu.
- Individuals who have created personal projects can use custom
size metrics in those projects simply by upgrading.
- The dashboard includes a new "Universal" metrics framework, which
supports project planning for diverse teams, including teams that do not
write software.
- A number of enhancements have been made to the WBS Editor:
- The WBS workflow editor has always offered the ability to attach
URL-based hyperlinks to workflows and their steps, enabling
individuals to have easy access to these links when they follow the
process. This functionality is now easier to use, thanks to a better
user interface for entering and editing these links.
- If the task percentages in a workflow do not add up to 100%, the
workflow editor will now display the actual sum for informational
purposes. If desired, you can normalize the percentages by
double-clicking that sum, or by clicking the new "%" button on the
toolbar.
- The Process Dashboard watches for WBS changes in the background, and
alerts the user if a sync is needed. Sometimes, the requisite
changes are minor, resulting in an alert that "miscellaneous project
information" was updated. On a busy team, these miscellaneous
changes can happen many times a day and become a source of annoyance.
To address this problem, the sync operation will now apply these
miscellaneous changes silently without bothering the user.
- In the WBS Editor, the "Export to Excel" functionality now includes
information on workflows, size metrics, proxy tables, milestones, and
team member availability.
- In the WBS Editor, the name of the "PROBE Task" option does not
convey an obvious meaning to people outside the PSP/TSP community.
So to improve usability, this option has been renamed to
"High-Maturity Planning Task" instead.
- The Task & Schedule window provides new options for sorting tasks:
- The Task & Schedule window now offers the option to sort tasks by
label, by the values that were entered in a custom WBS column, or by
temporary tags.
- A new option has been added to the Project Parameters and Settings
page, allowing an individual to request an automatic "Sort by
Milestone" after each WBS sync operation.
- In the Time and Defect Log Editors, the first column has historically
displayed the full path of the task where an item was logged. This column
now uses intelligent abbreviation, making the tables easier to read.
- The Workflow Process Analysis report now includes a navigation link to
quickly switch between different workflows.
- The "Status of Team Member Metrics" table now offers sortable column
headings, making it easier to identify team members who haven't synced or
exported recently.
- The Process Dashboard is now compatible with Java 18 and above. Teams who
have developed custom reporting add-ons will need to upgrade those add-ons to
work with version 2.7.
Features new in version 2.6
- Personal projects are now available, enabling high-performing individuals
to leverage the dashboard's sophisticated planning, tracking, and analysis
tools for independent work:
- Personal projects can be quickly and easily created by selecting
"
→ New
Project."
- Individuals can plan and track their work using the WBS Editor,
workflows, milestones, and all of the other tools that have
traditionally only been available on team projects. These tools have
been tailored for improved usability in these new single-person
projects.
- On new team projects (created after the installation of this update), team
members can enter planned and actual size directly in the WBS Editor. This
provides a number of significant benefits:
- The WBS allows much easier data entry than the old size management
approach, which centered around the Size Inventory Form. (Users can
still enter data on the Size Inventory Form if desired, but the WBS is
now the official system of record.)
- Using the WBS makes it easier to review size data for completeness and
accuracy. (This task was extremely difficult in the past when size
data was scattered across Size Inventory Forms in multiple personal
dashboards.)
- Using the WBS makes it possible to enter size data for a component
written by someone else. (For example, one person on the team could
now measure and enter the actual sizes of all components that were
finished during the previous cycle.)
- A number of enhancements have been made to earned value baselines:
- The Task & Schedule window will now allow you to save a periodic
snapshot of your plan without altering the official baseline.
- Two new charts scan the baselines/snapshots that have been saved for a
team project, and illustrate how the planned effort and planned
completion date have evolved over time.
- The Team Dashboard now automatically saves EV snapshots when a team
project is starting, and periodically thereafter. If a team forgets
to save a baseline of their plan after the launch, they can select one
of these automatic snapshots later as their official baseline.
- In the Task & Schedule window, when choosing "Tools → Manage
Baselines/Snapshots," teams can now view an EV report for one of their
historically saved baselines. If the number of baselines is large,
this makes it possible to identify the data each baseline
contains.
- The storage of baselines has been improved. In the past, a Team
Dashboard would use more memory when it contained a large number of
saved baselines. This problem has been resolved.
- The usability of various user interfaces has been improved:
- The completion checkbox (on the main dashboard toolbar) now makes it
easy to enter a specific day and time when a task was completed. Just
press the "Ctrl" key while clicking the checkbox.
- A new "Add Link" option makes it easy to add items to the script menu.
An 'edit' icon is also displayed on these custom links, making it easy
to correct mistakes.
- The toolbar in the WBS Editor has been reorganized onto two rows.
This prevents toolbar buttons from disappearing behind the tabbed
pane.
- On the Task & Schedule Flat View, a new button makes it easy to
sort tasks into milestone order.
- The LOC Counter generates a report with redlines, showing the lines of
code that have been added and deleted. Now, this report allows the
interleaving sections of unmodified code to be expanded and collapsed,
making it easier to focus on the changes themselves.
- Several improvements have been made to the team project joining process:
- A new file-based mechanism has been introduced for inviting team
members to join a project. This mechanism is easier to use in
organizations that employ tight network firewalls.
- When an individual is joining a team project, autocompletion hints are
now provided to help them pick the initials that were assigned in the
team member list.
- The Process Dashboard now supports the creation and use of metrics
frameworks that exclude some or all of the PSP phases. The WBS Editor will
hide the pentagonal "PSP Task" type for projects that use a PSP-incompatible
framework.
- After a hard drive crash, an individual might have to create a new
personal dashboard and rejoin the team project. The joining process now
includes a check for this scenario, and asks the individual if they would like
to restore their time and defect log entries from before the crash.
- When a task has been deleted from the WBS or reassigned to someone else,
the "Sync Work Breakdown Structure" operation asks for your permission to
delete the element from your personal plan. A new option on the project
parameters and settings page allows you to disable this permission step if you
desire (essentially auto-approving future task deletions).
- The dashboard's interactions with the Enterprise Server received a number
of security upgrades in keeping with current best practices.
- On Windows, better support is now provided for third-party Java
distributions.
Features new in version 2.5
- Significant enhancements have been made to the Work Breakdown Structure
Editor:
- A "Zoom" feature is now available for the WBS.
- The workflow editor now provides optional columns to enter the
estimated yield and defect injection rate for each workflow step.
These parameters make it possible to generate workflow-driven quality
plans for a project.
- After you apply a workflow in the WBS that spreads time across phases,
you may wish to delete a few steps that aren't needed for the
component in question. When you do, the time from the deleted tasks
will now be spread across the remaining tasks based on phase
percentages, leaving the overall component estimate unchanged.
- New, prototype integration has been added between the Team Dashboard
and external systems (such as TFS or JIRA). Organizations that are
interested in piloting this functionality are encouraged to contact
the Process Dashboard development team.
- The reports have been improved in several ways:
- In the Team Dashboard, the Rollup Plan Summary report now includes a
"Workflow Summary" section, which rolls up data according to the steps
in the team's custom workflows. This gives teams the power to analyze
data using their own processes (rather than just the metrics
collection framework).
- The Earned Value report now includes an option to hide cost
information. This can be useful if you need to share progress/status
with a customer or stakeholder, but you don't want them to be able to
reverse-engineer your hourly rate. To use this feature, click the
"Customize" link on the earned value report and check the box to hide
cost data.
- The Project Data Scanner now includes a section listing components
whose final workflow task was marked complete, but which have earlier
tasks that weren't closed, or that have no time logged.
- A number of user interface changes have been added for greater
convenience:
- The WBS Editor window now remembers its last size and location on
startup, along with the preferred widths of various columns.
- The WBS Editor toolbar now includes a "Save" button.
- A new "Open Link" button on the WBS Editor toolbar makes it easy to
quickly visit any external websites associated with the currently
selected item (for example, when URLs are embedded in the task
note).
- The personal dashboard toolbar now includes a "Find Task" button.
- The defect log editor now provides a button to add a new defect.
- When you choose the "Earned Value Charts" option from the script menu,
it will now display charts in an interactive, zoomable window.
- The defect creation window now stays on top of other windows, making
it easier to capture defect data while you are working in another
program like an IDE. To help maintain context, the window also
displays a label indicating the project and component that the defect
is being logged against.
- The main dashboard window now remembers its last location on
startup.
- The dashboard now uses a native visual theme on Windows computers,
allowing it to blend in more naturally with other applications.
- The LOC counter can now count changes between various commits in a Git
working directory.
- The performance of the "Sync to WBS" operation has been dramatically
improved for personal dashboards that contain a lot of historical data.
- Many changes have been made under-the-hood to improve the reliability and
security of various web-based tools and APIs.
- The dashboard installer has been updated to reflect the recent release of
PSP and TSP materials under a Creative Commons
license.
- A new Visual Studio plugin is available, making it possible for developers
to interact with the Process Dashboard and collect data without leaving their
IDE. Contact the development team if you would like to help pilot this new
functionality. If you use a different IDE and are interested in developing a
similar plugin, please contact the Process Dashboard development team for
information about the new REST APIs that support this goal.
Features new in version 2.4
- The Team Dashboard now includes a comprehensive framework for role-based
access control:
- A fine-grained permission hierarchy has been introduced. This
includes permissions for editing particular items (for example, "who
is allowed to modify milestones?") and for viewing sensitive data (for
example, "who is allowed to view the defect log?").
- A user interface is provided for defining roles, and stating the
permissions that each role should be granted.
- Finally, a user interface is provided for listing users and assigning
them roles. When users open the Team Dashboard or Work Breakdown
Structure, their actions will be subject to the role-based permissions
they have been granted.
The default, out-of-the-box behavior of the Team Dashboard remains unchanged.
But if teams wish to lock down their Team Dashboard, these new controls make
that possible.
- The Team Dashboard now includes a feature to define groups of users.
These can be used for many purposes: for example, to describe people from
different parts of the organization, different project subteams, or different
engineering disciplines. Once groups have been defined, reports can be
filtered to show data from a particular group.
- Several improvements have been made to the Work Breakdown Structure
Editor:
- The speed and responsiveness of several WBS editing operations
(including insert, rename, move up/down, cut/copy/paste, and delete)
have been significantly improved for large projects.
- Since 1.14.7, the WBS Editor has provided a filtering function. That
filtering function has been enhanced:
- When a filter is in effect, columns sums now respect the filter.
For example, when the "Time" column displays the total time for
the project or for a particular subcomponent, the displayed totals
will only include time from the visible children that matched the
filter.
- Many columns allow you to edit the total value on a parent
component, and will automatically scale the values on children to
satisfy your change. When a filter is in effect, this scaling
operation will no longer affect rows that were hidden by the
filter. (This effectively shields filtered components and tasks
from most editing operations.)
- If you have created custom columns in the WBS, you can now filter
the WBS based on data entered into those columns.
- Simpler, streamlined controls have been provided for hiding
completed tasks, and for narrowing the view to tasks performed by
particular individuals.
- A new "Show Related Tasks" option makes it possible to display all
of the tasks under components that matched the filter.
- The Find operation in the WBS has been extended to search in any
column (including custom columns), and a Replace feature has been
added as well.
- The WBS provides better autocompletion support for editing labels and
custom column values.
- Menus, labels, and messages in the WBS Editor can now be translated to
other languages using the Localization Tool.
- Several improvements have been made to team reports:
- A "Time Log" section has been added to the Rollup Plan Summary Report
in the Team Dashboard. This makes it possible to export the team time
log to Excel, and to see views of the team time log that are filtered
by label or group.
New teams will see this section
right away. If existing teams have customized the Rollup Plan Summary
(by clicking the "Edit this page" icon in the top-right corner of the
report), their local customizatons will override the addition of the
"Time Log" section to the default report structure. Those teams will
need to edit their customized report and add a "Time Log"
element.
- In the Gantt chart, you can now click the configuration icon (which
appears on the top-right of the chart) and toggle the display of
optional "Assigned To" and "Milestone" columns. These can be
especially helpful when printing or taking a screen capture of the
Gantt chart.
- If you open a Gantt chart by clicking on a bar in the EV Milestones
chart, the Gantt chart will display a line for the milestone commit
date.
- The configuration menu has historically been displayed as the single
letter "C" to save space. Now, it uses the
"
" icon, an industry-standard
representation for a menu of advanced and less-commonly-used
functionality.
- In the Team Dashboard, the "File → Alter Project" menu now includes
an option to close a project. This can be helpful if work is ending on a
given project, and it does not need to be relaunched for an additional
cycle.
- When more than one person is assigned to a task (such as an inspection),
it is helpful for an individual to know which other people they are
collaborating with. Now, this information is readily available from the task
dependency indicator on the main dashboard toolbar. It is also displayed in
the dependency column of the Task & Schedule window and the EV
Report.
- In the Time Card dialog, the columns depicting weekends now have a
different background color. This assists with the process of reviewing time
log data and correcting errors.
- The Process Dashboard has been upgraded to be Java-9-ready.
- When running in Java 9, the dashboard supports smooth scaling of the user
interface for HiDPI/Retina displays.
Features new in version 2.3
- The main dashboard toolbar now includes an "Add Task" button. This makes
it easy to quickly add a task to your plan without opening the WBS Editor
first.
- Powerful new features have been added for workflows:
- The Workflow Process Analysis report has been enhanced significantly:
- The report now displays an extensive collection of charts that
show various process metrics, and demonstrate how those metrics
have changed over time.
- The report now displays information about the number of defects
that were injected and removed in each phase of a workflow, along
with advanced quality metrics such as phase yield and defect
injection/removal rates.
- The report is now available in both the team and the personal
dashboard, to enable data-driven process improvement at both the
team and personal level.
- A powerful filtering feature has been added to the report, making
it possible to adjust the list of components and tasks that should
be included in the various charts and tables.
- A new editor makes it possible to configure process mappings between
workflows. These mappings can be used to:
- Document the evolution of a process when a team modifies the steps
in their workflow
- Combine data from several related workflows to produce
consolidated process reports
- Leverage historical data from old workflows for PROBE planning of
new work
- It is now possible to specify fixed times and minimum times for
selected steps in a team workflow. To use this feature, click the icon
that appears in the top-right corner of the Workflow Editor (just
above the vertical scroll bar), and enable the "Min Time" column.
Then enter minimum times as needed. (To specify a fixed time, enter a
minimum for a task that was otherwise assigned zero percent of the
overall workflow.)
- Significant enhancements have been made to defect logging functionality:
- When individuals log a defect within a team project, the "injected"
and "removed" selectors will now allow them to choose phases from the
team's defined workflows. (Previously, individuals were required to
select a phase from the underlying metrics framework, such as
TSP.)
- The defect timer and the main timer now work more closely together to
help you collect accurate data:
- If you start timing a defect, the dashboard will start the main
timer automatically. If the main timer is pointing at a different
task, the dashboard will ask you if you'd like to switch to the
task where this defect was logged.
- If you are timing a defect and you change the main timer to log
time to an unrelated task, the defect timer will pause
automatically.
- When you create or edit a defect, you can enter URLs to external
websites in the defect description. These URLs can be used to link
the defect to supporting references in a corporate defect tracker, a
requirements management system, or any other web-based system. When
such URLs are present, a hyperlink icon will appear over the
"Description" pane, making it easy to quickly jump to the given
URLs.
- If a defect is logged to the wrong component/task, you can now use
drag-and-drop in the Defect Log to move the defect to the correct
location.
- When defects are imported from ReviewBoard, the description will now
include the filename and line number that each defect was logged
against, as well as a hyperlink to the issue in ReviewBoard.
- Several improvements have been made to dashboard charts and reports:
- The Team Dashboard contains a new "Project Data Scanner" report, which
analyzes team project data to look for common problems and highlight
opportunties for improvement.
- A monthly earned value status report is now available. This shows
data in a format similar to the weekly report, but for an entire
calendar month instead. It can be useful for tracking and
communicating progress on a larger, longer term project.
- The Tasks In Progress chart now offers a customization setting to
color discs by assigned individual. Enabling this option makes it
easier to see if a particular individual has a large number of problem
tasks.
- Since version 2.0.2, the Team Dashboard has provided automatic labels
called "Completed_Tasks" and "Completed_Components". These labels make
it simple to filter the team reports so they only show data for
completed work. Now, these labels are available in the personal
dashboard as well.
- A mobile/smartphone application is available for use with the Process
Dashboard. The mobile app works alongside the Process Dashboard, making it
possible to perform a number of common tasks from an iPhone®,
iPad®, or AndroidTM device. (Note: the mobile app
requires the use of the Process Dashboard Enterprise Server, version 3.6.0 or
higher.)
- The "Rate" column in the team workflow editor is only useful for very
advanced teams (who have historical productivity data, and who are skilled
enough to produce accurate size estimates during a launch). But even for
those teams, its use is discouraged (since proxy estimation tables provide a
significantly more robust way to produce size and time estimates). In
recognition of these factors, the "Rate" column is now hidden on new projects
by default. Teams that wish to use it can easily reenable it by clicking the
column selection button on the toolbar of the Workflow Editor window.
- The WBS Editor now includes a "Collapse All" button on the toolbar.
- The filter dialog in the WBS Editor now includes an option to show tasks
that have not been assigned to any milestone.
- The Relaunch Wizard now provides better handling for PSP tasks that are
in-progress when a project is relaunched.
- The embedded data warehouse now includes baseline dates and costs, project
milestones, and task dependencies.
- If the user starts the timer and then marks a task complete before a full
minute has passed, the dashboard will now round the time log entry up to one
minute if no time has ever been logged to that task in the past. This
captures an individual's intent more accurately when a given project task
requires a very short period of time.
- The dashboard now provides improved support for individuals who work
offline, or who experience intermittent connectivity to the team network data
directory.
Features new in version 2.2
- It is now possible to create custom data columns in the Work Breakdown
Structure Editor. These can be used to tag WBS elements with team- or
organization-specific attributes, such as priority, relevant subsystem, issue
tracker ID, etc. The values entered can be used to filter team reports, and
are also accessible to data warehouse queries.
- The WBS Editor includes several powerful new features to make assigning
and reassigning work easier:
- The workflow editor includes a new "Performed By" column. You can
enter generic role names like "author," "reviewer," "tester," etc. in
this column; or if a specific person is always responsible for a
certain task, you can enter their initials. When the workflow is
applied to the WBS, team member initials result in automatic
assignments, and role names are displayed as placeholders. You can
click on a placeholder like «author» to assign an
individual to all of the matching tasks.
- In the past, the Assigned To column was only editable for leaf tasks.
Now, it is editable for parent components as well. This makes it
simple to reassign all of the tasks under a given component from one
person to another.
- Autocompletion support is provided in the Assigned To column as you
type the initials of the assigned team members.
- The WBS Editor include several powerful new features to assist with
balancing and capacity planning:
- In the WBS Editor, you can now choose a subset of the team and focus
the colored balancing bar on those individuals. This makes it
possible to see optimized balanced completion dates for a subgroup of
people on a multidisciplinary team (for example, just the developers
or just the testers). Subteams can be saved for use in future WBS
editing sessions.
- The WBS Editor has historically allowed the creation of "leaf"
components, that have a time estimate but no subtasks; these are
useful for many purposes such as capacity analysis and strategic
planning. Now, it is also possible to assign such a component to one
or more individuals, to model ownership and to perform rough capacity
planning at the personal level.
- It is now possible to highlight an individual milestone to assist with
workload balancing: just click on a milestone segment in one of the
colored balancing bars.
- To visualize the workload balance of multiple milestones, you can now
choose to recolor the balancing bars by milestone (rather than by
individual).
- The WBS Editor now includes an option to hide the horizontal and
vertical bars that depict the balanced team duration.
- Two new features make it easy to see how the Work Breakdown Structure has
changed over time:
- In the WBS Editor, the "File" menu now includes an option to
"Highlight and Review Changes." This option can flag all of the cells
that have been modified since a certain date. Selecting a flagged cell
then displays the history of how the value has changed over time,
along with the name of the individual who made each change.
- A new report is available in the Team Dashboard that displays a
chronological list of changes that have been made to the WBS of a
project. The report displays information about tasks that have been
added, deleted, and modified, and shows changes to the planned time
for various WBS items.
- The WBS Editor now provides a "Reapply Workflow" menu option. This can
find tasks in the WBS that were created by applying a workflow in the past,
and update those tasks based on the current workflow definition, to include:
- Inserting new workflow steps in the right order
- Updating the names and types of workflow steps that have changed
- Rearranging workflow steps if necessary
- Deleting WBS tasks for workflow steps that have been deleted
- Automatically assigning new tasks to individuals based on previously
assigned workflow roles
- Reallocating time across tasks based on updated workflow rates and/or
percentages
- A number of new charts have been added:
- A chart showing the cumulative defect removal curve for a team
project
- A scatter chart showing the size and time estimating errors for all of
the components in a team project
- A trend chart showing how the CPI has changed over time
- A variation on the Direct Time Trend chart which shows a line for each
team member
- A variation on the Earned Value Trend chart which shows a line for
each team member
- A two-dimensional trend chart displaying the evolution of actual/plan
ratios for direct time and task cost
- In the past, organizations that created their own custom metrics
collection frameworks were required to refresh those frameworks each time a
new version of the dashboard was released. This task is no longer necessary;
teams will enjoy the full benefits of each new version simply by upgrading the
dashboard.
- The WBS Editor now includes a feature to create and edit proxy tables,
which can be used to quickly estimate the size and time of WBS
components.
- The active task selector now dynamically moves older tasks into a
"Completed Items" submenu. This reduces clutter and makes it easier to focus
on active tasks. Users can configure the length of time that should pass
before a completed task is moved into this menu.
- Several usability enhancements were made in the Task & Schedule
window:
- Right-clicking on a task displays a menu of useful shortcuts. You can
open the time or defect log for the selected task, or copy task
details to the clipboard for pasting into another program.
- In the "Date" column, you can now use copy-and-paste to mark several
tasks complete with the same completion date.
- In the Chart dialog, you can now right-click on a chart and choose
"Copy" to copy the image to the clipboard.
- The Cumulative Earned Value and Cumulative Direct Time charts now
include a "Replan" line.
- When the Task & Schedule window opens, it will automatically
select the row for the current week, and display it with a bold
font.
- The buttons on the main toolbar now have larger icons when the "large
fonts" preference has been enabled, and the icon for the reports/scripts/tools
button has been updated to better suggest its function.
- By default, the dashboard will select the next task after you mark a task
complete. If this behavior is undesired, it can now be disabled via the
Preferences dialog.
- In the personal dashboard, the Hierarchy Editor now allows individuals to
move team projects to a different folder, by using the "Cut" and "Paste"
buttons. Individuals can use this to move old project cycles to an "archive"
folder.
- It is now possible to export defect type standards to an XML file, then
import them into another team or personal dashboard.
Features new in version 2.1
- The Process Dashboard's internal web server has been enhanced to support
Java servlets and JSPs. This makes it possible to
develop custom reports using
standard Java technologies, and run them against the project data in the Team
Dashboard.
- Significant new features have been added for Common Team Workflows:
- In the WBS Editor, different icons are now used to visually
distinguish tasks that were created by the application of a workflow.
This makes it possible to track the process origin of a particular
task in the plan.
- In the Team Dashboard, a new "Workflow Process Analysis" report is
provided on the script menu. This report shows the time spent in each
step of the workflow, along with high-level metrics such as cost of
quality and historical productivity rates.
- When defining a workflow, teams can now add a special "Personal PROBE
Planning" element. This element enables the assigned individual to
use the Size Estimating Template and PROBE Wizard to generate size and
time estimates for their work. It also provides a personal Project
Plan Summary for the component, as well as a "To Date" report showing
aggregate metrics for other components that the individual has
produced using this workflow.
- The Common Team Workflows window will now allow teams to prepopulate
workflows with labels and notes. To do this, teams can click a button
in the top-right corner of the workflows table to select the optional
workflow columns they wish to edit.
- The embedded database in the Team Dashboard now includes information
about the workflows that were used to generate various tasks in a
project plan.
- A new Relaunch Wizard is provided to help teams prepare for team project
relaunch meetings. This Relaunch Wizard:
- Creates a new Team Project to hold the plan for the new iteration, and
invites team members to join this new project iteration.
- Copies the workflows, milestones, and team member schedules from the
old plan to the new plan.
- Copies incomplete components and tasks from the old plan to the new
plan, and adjusts the planned times of in-progress tasks to account
for work that has already been performed.
- Marks the old project as closed, indicating that no additional work
will be performed there. The next Sync WBS operation will help team
members to close the remaining tasks on the old project.
- Milestones receive significantly improved support within earned value
schedules:
- A new Milestones chart is available for earned value schedules in both
the team and personal dashboard. This chart displays a horizontal bar
for each milestone, comparing projected progress to the milestone
commit dates. When the plan is not projected to satisfy a given
milestone date, you can click on the corresponding bar and view a
Gantt chart to determine which tasks are responsible for the
slip.
- The Task & Schedule window, EV report, and weekly report display a
new Milestone column (rather than folding milestone data into the
Labels column).
- When a task is projected to miss a milestone commit date, the new
Milestone column will visually flag an error and provide a tooltip
with more information.
- In Flat View, an individual can check a box to highlight all of the
tasks associated with a particular milestone. When they do this, a
dashed line is drawn over the list of tasks to illustrate the commit
date when tasks must be completed. These features help the individual
as they rearrange tasks to meet the deadline.
- The enhanced charts are now available for all teams to use free of
charge.
- The Weekly EV Report has always displayed the total actual time logged
against each completed and in-progress task. Now, it also displays the amount
of time that was logged to each task during the week in question. This makes
it possible to distinguish between active and idle tasks.
- When filtering a report in the Team Dashboard, two new tokens are
automatically available. "Completed_Tasks" filters the report to display the
tasks that have been marked complete, and "Completed_Components" filters the
report to show data from team project components that are 100% complete.
- The active task selector has been redesigned to make better use of
available space, and to better support complex projects with deep work
breakdown structures. The main window now displays as much of the active task
name as possible, and the portions that do not fit are displayed in an
overflow menu.
- It is now possible to move time log entries to a different task by
dragging and dropping rows in the time log editor.
- The Task & Schedule dialog now provides new options for working with
multiple baselines:
- You can now save multiple baselines for an EV schedule, providing a
name and optional comment for each one.
- You can view the list of baselines that have been saved for a
schedule, edit their details, and delete them if necessary.
- You can review the saved baselines for a schedule and select the one
that should be "active" for the purposes of charts, reports, and
calculations.
- When individuals join a team project, they will experience a new
streamlined joining process:
- Instead of being presented with page after page of questions, they
will see a single form that collects all the necessary
information.
- The new form provides reasonable default values whenever possible.
Fields that need attention are visually highlighted so they stand out
from the fields that already have a workable default value.
- As they click on various fields, context-sensitive help is displayed
to explain the data that is needed.
- New performance tunings were added to improve the startup and shutdown
time of large team and personal dashboards.
- The "Find Task" functionality (available in the personal dashboard by
typing Ctrl-F) has been improved for better usability. Completed tasks are
indicated with a strikethrough, and past projects can be collapsed so they do
not participate in the search operation.
- A new option in the Team Member List makes it easy to move the start date
of the entire team at once. This option is provided in the "Team Schedule
Settings" window that appears when you click the date customization
hyperlink.
- The WBS Editor has traditionally displayed values with only one digit of
precision after the decimal point. When numbers in a plan were smaller than
0.1, unusual rounding errors would sometimes occur. These problems have been
corrected.
- Additional keyboard shortcuts are now available for many actions in the
WBS Editor.
- A new user preference enables the main window's title bar to display
timing information for the currently active task.
- When an individual is participating in more than one team project
simultaneously, they can create an EV Rollup in their personal dashboard to
display a consolidated plan for their work. Now, the Task & Schedule
window for that EV Rollup provides special support for balancing available
task hours across the various projects. Clicking on the PT (planned time)
column for a schedule row opens an interactive dialog for visually
reallocating time and managing the total amount of time that has been
committed across all of the projects.
- If an individual leaves the timer running for several hours, the
dashboard will now display a warning message asking if they did this
intentionally. This can help individuals catch their mistake if they forget
to stop the timer (for example, if they leave it running overnight).
- The Task & Schedule dialog now has an "Expand All" option on the View
menu.
Features new in version 2.0
- The Process Dashboard now includes a powerful new
Data Warehouse component. This
component stores team project data in a relational database, making it
possible for external analysis and reporting tools to access project data via
SQL queries.
- The various reports, charts, and calculations in the Team Dashboard have
been rewritten to take advantage of the Data Warehouse component. As a
result, Team Dashboard reports are displayed 100 to 1000 times faster than
before. Team Dashboard memory usage has also decreased significantly.
Together, these improvements introduce a dramatic change in the scalability of
the Team Dashboard for large and long-running project teams.
- For over a decade, the Team Dashboard has reused the same graphical user
interface as the "personal" Dashboard. With this release, the Team Dashboard
now displays a redesigned user interface that focuses on the needs of coaches,
team leaders, team role managers, and other users of consolidated team data.
The new interface provides quick access to team tools and reports, improving
productivity of existing teams, and reducing the learning curve for teams that
are new to the Process Dashboard.
- Historically, some teams have observed extremely long startup times for
the Team Dashboard - especially when opening the data over a VPN, WAN, or
other slow network. This version introduces a change to the storage strategy
for team projects, enabling significantly faster startup times for the Team
Dashboard.
- When the Team Dashboard and Process Dashboard shut down, a task runs to
export data for various team projects. Historically, as more team projects
are added to a particular dashboard, this export step takes longer and longer.
In this version, the export task has been streamlined significantly, allowing
the dashboard to shut down much faster.
- Significant improvements have been made to the efficiency of the earned
value calculation logic, enabling earned value reports to display much faster
than before.
- The Defect Log Editor now includes an option to import defects from the
Review Board code review tool.
- A new REST API has been provided that makes it possible for external tools
(running on the same computer as the personal Process Dashboard) to add
entries to the Size Inventory Form for a Team Project.
- The splash screen appears more quickly after clicking an icon to launch
the Process Dashboard.
Features new in version 1.15
- It is now possible for multiple individuals to edit the Work Breakdown
Structure at the same time:
- When you save changes to the WBS, the application will check to see if
other individuals have recently saved changes as well. If they have,
the save operation will merge their changes into your view.
- If you wish to merge other people's recently saved changes into your
view without saving your own in-progress edits, a new "Refresh Data"
option is available on the "File" menu for this purpose.
- In either case, if the merge identifies editing conflicts (where you
and another individual have made conflicting edits to the same value),
warning messages will be displayed. These warnings include hyperlinks
that help you to locate and recover from the editing conflict.
- The Work Breakdown Structure Editor now includes a feature to save data to
a ZIP file. This feature can be used to:
- Create multiple alternative plans during a launch
- Explore what-if replanning scenarios in the middle of a team
project iteration
- Save edits if the network server is temporarily unreachable
- Copy components tasks, milestones, team members, and workflows
into a new team project iteration
- Many other significant changes were made to the Work Breakdown Structure
Editor:
- The WBS Editor now includes a filtering function. This makes it
possible to focus in on the set of components and tasks that contain
certain words in the name or notes, that are assigned to various
people, that are complete/incomplete, or that have certain labels or
milestones.
- The WBS Editor now includes a search feature. This makes it possible
to quickly find components or tasks whose name or notes contain
particular words.
- The colored balancing bars in the WBS Editor have been enhanced to
calculate dates that align more closely to the "Replan" dates in the
team earned value report.
- The colored balancing bars can now display the typical number of hours
per week each team member has in their schedule. A new menu option
makes it possible to toggle this display on and off.
- On the colored balancing bars, it is now possible to hide the colored
diamonds and commit date lines for selected milestones. This can help
reduce clutter when many intermediate milestones are present.
- In the WBS Editor, the Task Details tab now contains a "Data Problems"
column. When a coach, planning manager, quality manager, or other
individual discovers a problem for a particular component or task,
they can type a description of the problem in this field. Doing so
will display a red highlight behind the component/task, making it
easier to bring the item to the attention of another individual.
- Move Up and Move Down buttons are now provided on the toolbar of the
WBS Editor Milestones window.
- The "Task Time" tab of the WBS Editor includes a column called "Task
Size." When you create tasks underneath a component, the numbers in
this column are automatically inherited from that component. Now,
these numbers are editable as well, so you can override the size for
a particular task.
- The WBS Editor's memory footprint has been changed to help improve
performance for teams with very large work breakdown structures.
- Historically, if a Team Dashboard was opened in read-only mode, the
read-only flag would also propagate to any WBS Editor windows that
were opened. This linkage has been broken. As a result, an
individual can now open the Team Dashboard in read-only mode (for
example, to view team rollups), and then open the WBS Editor to make
changes if problems are noted.
- During a project launch, teams commonly need to perform high-level
capacity planning - for example, to estimate the end-to-end project schedule
and to choose the scope for various project iterations. Several changes have
been made to facilitate this activity:
- The WBS balancing panel now includes a "Team" row in addition to the
colored bars for each team member. This new team row displays the
balanced completion dates for each milestone, making it easier to
distribute work across a series of future iterations.
- In earlier versions of the dashboard, teams would have to create
"placeholder" tasks to record time estimates for this future work.
Now, rough time estimates (and milestones) can be entered directly on
WBS components that have no subtasks, and the vertical black balancing
bar will take these time estimates into account.
- Teams may wish to enter vacation time or other schedule exceptions in
the WBS Editor Team Member List months in advance. In the past, this
would cause the team earned value charts to extend artificially far
into the future (to include the week when the exception was recorded).
The earned value charts have been enhanced to avoid this problem.
- Several changes have been made to improve the usability of the user
interface:
- Historically, clicking the script button has opened the "default"
script, form, or report for the currently active task. To view the
menu of other available scripts and forms, it was necessary to click
the small down-arrow to the right of the script button. In practice,
however, opening the script menu is a far more common action.
Accordingly, the behavior of the main script button has been changed
to open the menu instead of opening the default script. For users who
prefer the former behavior, a checkbox is provided in the Tools >
Preferences window to revert back.
- In the Task & Schedule window, it is now possible to choose the
set of columns you prefer to see in the Task list. This can reduce
clutter and make it easier to focus on the information that is most
important to you. In addition, if the table columns are resized or
rearranged, these changes will be remembered the next time you open
that task list.
- Several common items on the script menu have been given clearer,
simpler names to reduce confusion and to lower the learning curve for
people who are beginning their first team project.
- The Preferences tool now includes an option to enable large fonts
throughout the application.
- Several enhancements have been made to the charts and reports:
- The Weekly EV Report has always included "Previous" and "Next" links
to scroll forward and backward in time. Now, it also includes a link
for jumping directly to a specific date.
- When applying a label filter to the Team Project Rollup Plan Summary,
autocompletion support is now provided as you type.
- The Tasks In Progress chart is now configurable, allowing you to
change the red overspent rings to either black or white.
- When viewing the Kanban chart for a team, you can now filter the list
of tasks by assigned individual.
- Several enhancements have been made to the LOC Counting support:
- The LOC counter now includes support for counting changes made to
files in a subversion repository. The count can include uncommitted
changes made to a working copy as well as changes made in past
revisions. Multiple past revisions can be listed, and need not be not
consecutive.
- The LOC Counter report is often used during the postmortem phase of a
PSP project to measure added, deleted, and modified lines of code.
Now, individuals can drag data from that report and drop it onto a row
in the Size Estimating Template to apply actual size metrics.
- When creating tasks and workflows in the WBS, it is a best practice to use
a PSP Task to represent detailed software development activities. Several
improvements have been made to this support:
- In the WBS, a PSP Task can be followed by Design and Code Inspection
tasks to represent the associated peer reviews. When this pattern has
been followed, the Task & Schedule "Flat View" will now
automatically insert the inspections into the correct order within the
phases of the PSP task.
- The dashboard has always allowed individuals to configure multiple
collections of "To Date" data that can be used to track different
types of work. Now, new options on the Team Project Parameters and
Settings page allow individuals to select which "To Date" rollup they
would like to use for new PSP tasks.
- Teams sometimes encounter, fix, and log defects that should not
technically count against their quality metrics. (For example, they might fix
a defect in legacy code that they inherited from some external source.)
Individuals can now enter 0 in the "Fix Count" field of the defect
dialog to indicate that a defect should not count against quality metrics such
as yield or defect density.
- If you drag-and-drop an empty directory onto the Quick Launcher, it will
now ask you if you wish to create a new Team or Personal dataset there.
- When saving a data backup file, it has historically been possible to save
in either ZIP or PDBK format. Now, a third option is available: "Redacted
Process Dashboard Backup." Choosing this format allows you to select various
categories of data (for example, names of individuals, projects and tasks)
that should be scrambled or removed from the backup. This can be a useful
tool to protect privacy or confidentiality.
Features new in version 1.14
- Significant changes were made to the earned value support:
- It is now possible to customize the set of charts that appear on the
earned value report. In addition, clicking on these charts now opens
a page displaying a larger chart with helpful instructions on how the
chart can be used and interpreted.
- The Earned Value report now includes a "More Charts" hyperlink.
Clicking on this link makes it possible to see all of the EV charts
in the web browser. (Previously, many of these charts were only
available in the "Chart" dialog of the Task & Schedule
window.)
- New charts have been added to display the Earned Value Trend and the
Direct Time Trend.
- The earned value report now includes a "Kanban View" of the tasks
that have been completed recently, the tasks that are in progress,
and the tasks that are planned for the near future.
- By default, the bars on the Gantt charts depict dates from the
Forecast column of the task list. Now, a configuration button makes
it possible to depict Plan, Replan, or Baseline dates instead.
- In the past, the Weekly EV report used generic phrases such as "Tasks
Completed This Week." This wording was confusing for views of data
in the past or the future. These section headings have been altered
to be clearer and more descriptive.
- New topics have been added to the online help for each of the earned
value charts. These topics explain how to interpret the data in each
chart, and provide helpful analysis tips for people who are new to
earned value tracking.
- A new help topic has been added that explains the difference between
Plan, Replan, and Forecast dates. This help topic explains these
three calculations in detail, so users can understand and appreciate
the differences between the dates that are generated.
- The WBS now has a special "personal editing mode." When the WBS is
opened from a personal dashboard instead of the Team Dashboard (and the team
leader has not disabled edits by team members), the WBS becomes aware of the
individual who opened it, and changes its behavior:
- Newly created tasks are automatically assigned to the individual who
opened the WBS.
- If the individual makes a change that affects one of their coworkers,
the WBS will display a warning and offer to undo the change.
- The individual is only allowed to edit their own row in the Team
Member List.
- The individual can disable these features if desired by toggling a
checkbox in the "Team" menu. (So for example, these new features
will not prevent a Planning Manager from making changes to their
coworker's tasks.)
- Numerous changes were made to provide better support for the SEI PSP
courses:
- A new Student Profile element has been added to the PSP course
assignment sequence, giving students an opportunity to answer
questions about their job position, experience, and so on.
- The Analysis Report exercises now allow the use of the Size
Estimating Template and PROBE.
- "To Date" metrics are no longer reset on the first PSP2 project in a
PSP Fundamentals & Advanced course.
- During the PSP course, PROBE Method D for Size will require students
to use their Estimated Proxy Size verbatim; they will not be allowed
to edit the number.
- During the PSP course, the PROBE Wizard will not offer PROBE Method
C1 for Size as a selectable option.
- The final page of the PROBE Wizard has always performed a sanity
check on the planned productivity. If it is unrealistic, the wizard
prints a warning message and takes the user back to reevaluate their
estimates. Unfortunately, that warning message was easy to overlook,
resulting in confusion when the PROBE wizard looped back to the
earlier pages. The buttons and messages on the sanity check page
have been altered to make it more clear that a planning error may be
present.
- When students are allowed to edit the quality plan and they produce
phase times that do not sum up properly, an error message is now
displayed on the Project Plan Summary.
- Student data can now be exported to an XML file.
- When capturing defect data, individuals can now:
- Make a single entry to represent several related defects that were
found and fixed simultaneously.
- Mark a defect as "pending" (i.e. found, but not yet removed).
- Alter the date associated with the defect entry.
- Several usability enhancements have been made to the WBS Editor and the
team project integration features:
- The Team Project Setup Wizard will now provide suggested default
values for the team process, the name of the EV schedule, and the
location of the Team Project Network Directory.
- If an individual enters their initials incorrectly when joining a
team project, the "Sync to WBS" operation will detect this error and
display a message, helping them to correct it.
- Actual Size is now displayed in the WBS Editor for each component in
the hieararchy.
- The charts in the Rollup Plan Summary report will now use
consistent colors to represent the various phases in the standard
metrics collection frameworks. This makes it easier to correlate
data between several charts.
- When a note is attached to the root node of the project in the WBS
Editor, that note will now be copied down into the personal plans of
each individual. This can be used to record helpful project-specific
URLs for team use.
- In the past, if a node was deleted from the WBS and a new node was
created in its place with the same name, the Sync to WBS operation
would perform a similar delete/recreate operation. Now, the Sync to
WBS attempts to detect this scenario and reuse the existing node
instead of deleting/recreating it. (Note: deleting/recreating nodes
in the WBS is still discouraged; but now when the mistake occurs, the
consequence should be less severe.)
- In the past, the WBS editor would display a confirmation prompt every
time you request to delete a node. Now, the WBS Editor will only
display this confirmation prompt when the node to be deleted has
actual time associated with it - and the warning message has been
altered to describe this new condition.
- In the past, when a leaf task in the WBS was subdivided, the next
"sync to WBS" operation would often result in a "top-down-bottom-up"
error in the personal plan of the affected individual. This problem
has been corrected.
- Significant changes were made to the installer for the Process Dashboard:
- The installer can now create application shortcuts for many
users on Unix and Linux platforms.
- On 64-bit Windows, sometimes the installer would not create Process
Dashboard shortcuts. This problem has been corrected.
- If a user has less than 800MB of memory (for example, because they
are running in a virtual machine), the Process Dashboard shortcuts
would fail to start the application. The installer has been adjusted
to create shortcuts that work on systems with limited memory.
(Note that the Process Dashboard does not require or use that much
memory; the problem was with the shortcut icon itself, not the
application.)
- Several changes have been made to improve compatibility with various
programs and operating systems:
- The "Export to Excel" hyperlinks have been tweaked to improve
compatibility with a variety of web browsers and with newer versions
of Microsoft Office.
- On some versions of Unix (for example, Solaris and RedHat), the
Process Dashboard would sometimes appear to hang at the splash
screen. This was occurring when a dialog box was displayed (to
prompt for some type of input), because the Unix window manager was
improperly stacking the dialog box behind the splash screen. This
problem has been corrected.
- If the dashboard data directory was unreachable (for example, because
it was on a network drive that was unavailable), or if other
operating-system-specific problems prevented the dashboard from
locking the data, the dashboard was incorrectly displaying a message
claiming that someone on another computer had locked the data. This
error message has been corrected and clarified.
- The "Import Defects from Code Collaborator" feature was not working
against Code Collaborator version 6. This problem has been
corrected.
- The "Generic" process template now allows the use of the Size Estimating
Template and PROBE. (This functionality will appear for projects created
using the Generic process template after upgrading to version
1.14.)
- The "C > Tools" menu now includes an "Open Dataset" option, giving all
users the ability to open data backup ZIP files.
- When users filter the Time Log Editor to display the current week, they
can now easily select which day of the week to use as the starting
point.
- In the past, when a user made a change to a data value within the Process
Dashboard, that change might take 30 seconds to appear on the Project Plan
Summary form in their web browser. Now, these changes will appear in the web
browser immediately.
- The LOC counter that is built in to the Process Dashboard will now count
lines appropriately even when comment indicators appear within string
literals.
- When all the tasks in a earned value task list share a common path prefix
(common for team projects), the Flat View will extract that common prefix,
making the display easier to read.
- In the defect log editor, a combo box displays the defect type standard
that has been set at each level of the hierarchy. In the past, when a defect
type standard had been set at the team project level, nothing was displayed
in this combo box for individual, leading people to think that their standard
had not taken effect. Now, this combo box will display the name of the defect
type standard that was set by the team project, minimizing confusion.
Features new in version 1.13
- Several enhancements have been made in the Work Breakdown Structure
Editor:
- A strikethrough font is now used in the "Assigned To" column to
indicate which individuals have completed a multi-person task.
- "Move Up" and "Move Down" buttons have been added to the
toolbar.
- The Team Member List will now allow you to reorder individual team
members using drag-and-drop.
- If you are starting a new project iteration, you can now use Ctrl-C
and Ctrl-V to copy and paste team members from the old team member list
to the new team member list.
- In the past, when individual team members open the WBS from their
personal dashboard, the WBS Editor would sometimes unexpectedly open in
read-only mode. This problem has been corrected.
- In the past, the Team Dashboard's Team Project Parameters and
Settings page displayed a checkbox allowing the team leader to decide
whether team members could edit the WBS. This checkbox has been moved
into the Work Breakdown Structure Editor itself, in the "Edit >
Preferences" dialog. As a result, if a team leader has locked down the
WBS (forbidding edits by team members), they will need to reaffirm this
choice in the "Edit > Preferences" dialog of the WBS Editor after
upgrading to version 1.13
- If you insert a workflow underneath a component that has a LOC size
estimate, the Code task in that workflow will automatically inherit
that size estimate.
- The selection colors have been modified to produce better
readability on Mac OS X.
- Several enhancements have been made in the WBS Common Team Workflows
window:
- It is now possible to define a workflow that distributes time
across various phases using percentages, even if your team does not use
size estimates or historical productivity rates.
- The keyboard accessibility of the Common Team Workflows editor has
been improved. Keystrokes such as Tab, Enter, Delete, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V,
and Ctrl-X will now assume intuitive, spreadsheet-like behaviors when
the focus is not in the first column.
- The Task Size Units column now supports autocompletion.
- Several enhancements have been made in the Task & Schedule
window:
- When an individual views one of their personal earned value task
lists in the Task & Schedule window, they will see a "Notes"
column that allows them to view and edit the notes associated with
each component or task.
- When an individual views one of their personal earned value task
lists in the Task & Schedule window, the schedule pane (in the
lower portion of the window) now contains a "Notes" column. This
column can be used to record the reason why a particular week has an
unusual number of planned or actual direct task hours.
- A strikethrough font is now used to indicate tasks that are 100%
complete.
- When you toggle from "Tree View" to "Flat View" and back, the
currently selected task will be preserved.
- The Defect Log Editor now provides a feature to Import defects from the
system clipboard. This can be used to copy and paste defects from an
external source, like an Excel spreadsheet or a web page.
- The "Tools > Preferences" dialog now shows an "Always on Top"
option. (This feature will only appear if you are using Java 1.6 or
higher.)
- If you pause the timer on the main dashboard toolbar, it will pause the
"Fix Time" timer on the currently active defect dialog as well. If you
subsequently resume the main dashboard timer, it will resume the defect fix
timer as well.
- The dashboard has always allowed you to set an "END" date for a
personal earned value schedule. (This feature is typically used to record
the date when an individual will unequivocally leave a project team, due to
an impending reassignment.) When an individual with an END date is
assigned too much work, their personal schedule may project that certain
tasks will "never" be completed. Although that information is useful at an
individual level, it can result in a frustrating lack of insight at the
team level. Now, when one of these schedules is a part of a team schedule,
the team rollup schedule will hypothetically rebalance these tasks to the
rest of the team, calculate the date when the rest of the team might
complete the tasks, and display that completion date in the team's "merged"
view. The "Assigned To" column for such a task will indicate that the task
has been hypothetically rebalanced to the team.
Features new in version 1.12
- Since version 1.7, the dashboard has included a team metrics collection
framework called "Software Systems Development." To avoid any potential
copyright violations, that metrics framework has used a different set of
process phases than the TSP(SM). Beginning with version 1.12,
we are happy to announce that the Software Engineering Institute has
granted us permission to distribute a TSP-compatible metrics framework.
This new framework will reduce the learning curve for TSP teams as they
first begin to use the Process Dashboard.
- Process Dashboard installers are now provided to support the assignment
sequence of the PSP(SM) Fundamentals and Advanced courses.
- It is now possible to attach HTTP URLs to the elements in a Common Team
Workflow. This can be used to associate organizational process scripts or
wiki pages that describe the steps in a workflow. (Note: this feature is
only available for team projects that are created using Process Dashboard
1.12 or later.)
- Data from earned value schedules can now be exported to Microsoft
Project in the new MS Office XML format.
- The "Status of Team Member Metrics" page has always displayed the date
when each team member last exported their metrics. Now, it also displays
the date they last performed a "Sync to WBS" operation.
- In the past, the components and tasks in a rolled-up team EV schedule
would sometimes not appear in the same order that they appear in the WBS.
The reporting logic has been enhanced so the EV schedule will follow the
WBS element ordering more closely.
- Charts have been added to the PSP project plan summary forms to display
time, defects, and PQI.
- In the WBS Editor Team Member List, the column headers now display dates
in a locale-sensitive manner for non-US teams.
- Teams can optionally choose to have the WBS Editor prompt for read-only
mode on startup. (This option can be controlled on a project-by-project
basis.)
- In the WBS Editor and in the EV reports, when a percent complete number
is greater than 99.5% but less than 100%, it will be rounded down to 99%.
This helps to avoid confusion, since 100% will now only appear for tasks
that are truly complete.
- The EV Report will now display a warning message if tasks have been
marked complete in the future, or if time has been logged in the future.
This can help in the troubleshooting of problems caused by data entry
typos.
- On the Weekly EV Report, the "Tasks Completed Last Week" table now
displays a total row.
- Some international dashboard users have seen problems with corruption
of accented characters in the Team Dashboard. A new feature is provided in
the Preferences dialog to help those teams.
- In the personal dashboard, the Team Project Tools and Settings page has
previously included a checkbox to "Include all WBS components and documents
in sync operations." This checkbox represented obsolete functionality, and
now only causes problems when individuals enable it out of curiosity. To
avoid those problems, the feature has been removed.
- Teams that have upgraded to a recent version of the Code Collaborator
server were finding that defect types were no longer being transferred by
the "Import from Code Collaborator" feature. This problem has been
corrected.
- A bug was affecting the date-based filtering of entries in the Time Log
(for example, when you request to view time log entries for "Today"). This
bug has been corrected.
- The Perforce LOC counter can now count LOC in integration changelists.
This functionality is designed to support the workflow where an individual
makes changes in a personal sandbox, then integrates those changes back to
the main line of development. In that case, the individual can point the
LOC counter at the changelist where the files were integrated back to the
mainline, and receive a LOC count of the effective changes.
- Installers are now available in EXE format for use on Windows systems.
These EXEs can simplify the installation process for users who previously
encountered problems with filesystem permissions in Windows Vista.
Features new in version 1.11
- URLs can now be attached to any component or task in the dashboard.
Just use the WBS Editor or the dashboard to edit the free-text note
associated with a particular item, and enter a URL within the body of the
note. The dashboard will discover the embedded URLs and add them to the
script menu for easy, one-click access.
- A new Preferences dialog is available on the "C > Tools" menu,
providing easy access to the most common configuration settings.
- Several enhancements were made to the usability of the WBS Editor:
- Pressing the Enter key in the WBS Editor typically inserts a new
task. A new button is now provided to toggle this behavior on and
off.
- The WBS Editor now uses a strikethrough font to highlight tasks that
are 100% complete.
- A "New Tab" button is now displayed, providing one-click access to
the functionality on the WBS Editor "Tabs" menu.
- Significant enhancements have been made to the PSP materials in the
Process Dashboard:
- The PSP scripts and forms in the Process Dashboard have been updated
to match the materials in the 2005 book, A Self-Improvement
Process for Software Engineers. (Up to now, they have been based
upon the 1995 book, A Discipline for Software
Engineering.) With this change, the scripts, forms, and wizards
now match the materials and terminology used in the most recent PSP
courses from the SEI. (Note: the PSP materials are now released as a
separate download from the Process Dashboard.)
- On the Size Estimating Template, the estimated size of an "added
part" will be computed automatically after an engineer estimates its
type, relative size, and number of items. Engineers can create their
own size-per-item lookup tables in support of this
functionality.
- On the Size Estimating Template, an interactive chart now appears to
help engineers visualize the relationship between estimated base,
added, deleted, and modified size. Engineers can drag handles on a
slider to visually estimate base additions, modifications, and
deletions as a percentage of base program size.
- The PSP Project Plan Summary forms are now customizable, in support
of personal process improvement goals.
- Significant changes have been made in support of the PSP for Engineers
courses:
- A new "Grading Helper" has been created for PSP Instructors. After
installing a special "PSP Instructor" add-on, this grading helper
will appear in the script menu for PSP course assignments. The
grading helper automates many of the data analysis tasks and
consistency checks that are part of the grading process. Instructors
can customize the form to match their grading preferences.
- The dashboard traditionally baselines "Planned" and "To Date" project
data at specific points during a project. Although this strategy is
very helpful for the planning and tracking of real-world project
work, it becomes an impediment to the quick-turnaround learning
objectives of the PSP course, because the "frozen" values prevent
students from correcting errors in earlier assignments. To address
this problem, this "freezing" mechanism has now been disabled for the
assignments in the PSP course.
- It is now much easier for students to create the quality plan for
their first PSP2 assignment.
- Error messages now appear on the Project Plan Summary form to
warn engineers about common mistakes. For example, if students
forget to enter the actual size of Program 1, an error message
will appear on their Program 2 Project Plan Summary form.
- When you first create a team project, the Team Project Setup Wizard
prompts you for the name of a directory where team data should be stored.
Later in the project, you may discover that you need to move these files to
a different location on the network. A new feature makes this
possible.
- The dashboard has always included advanced earned value features to
support iterative project planning. Unfortunately, some teams would
inadvertently trigger these advanced features by choosing a start date in
the future (for example, the week after their project launch). To
avoid this confusion, the iterative planning feature must now be explicitly
enabled in the "Tools > Schedule Options" dialog of the Task &
Schedule window.
- Geographically diverse teams - such as teams split between India and
the United States - would sometimes see inconsistent data in the earned
value reports. New time-zone awareness logic has been added to address
these problems.
- The defect log now includes an "Import from Code Collaborator"
button. Teams that use Collaborator
(http://smartbear.com/) can take advantage of this
new import feature to reduce double-entry of defect data.
Features new in version 1.10
- The Process Dashboard is now released under version 3 of the GNU
General Public License.
- For new team projects, created after the
installation of this update, a new task structure will be used:
- Previously, the process phase of a task (e.g. Planning, Code, Test,
etc) was recorded via a final "stub" that appeared at the end of each
task in the hierarchy. Now, these stubs are no longer created. This
change reduces clutter, makes it easier to subdivide existing tasks,
and reduces the memory usage of the Process Dashboard.
- In a new-style team project, individuals will have a project plan
summary report similar to the one on the team side: it can be edited
to include custom charts, reports, and tables of data.
- Important: Data from new-style and old-style team projects
can still be rolled up together into master projects.
- For a new-style team project that is underway,
new columns will appear in the Work Breakdown Structure Editor to display
actual metrics:
- Actual time spent on each task
- Actual completion date
- Percent complete
- Percent spent
Among other things, this makes it possible to see which tasks have been
completed, which are in progress, and which have not yet started.
- When changes are made in the WBS, individuals use the "Sync to WBS"
operation to copy those changes into their personal plan. In a new-style team project, the synchronization is now
bidirectional. When individuals make changes to the following data in
their personal plan, the changes will be propagated back into the WBS
automatically:
- Changes to the planned time for tasks
- Changes to the planned hours in the schedule
- Changes to task notes/comments
- Changes to the phase type of a task (e.g. Planning, Code, etc.)
- The colored bars in the WBS Editor are a useful tool for balancing work
between team members. For a new-style team project
that is underway, these bars can now be toggled between two modes:
- Show End-to-End Plan: This mode takes all tasks into account.
The dates calculated for each team member will correspond to the
"Planned Completion Date" for that individual in their personal
earned value schedule.
- Show Remaining Work: This mode subtracts out tasks that have
already been completed, as well as effort spent on in-progress work.
The dates calculated for each team member will correspond to the
"Replanned Completion Date" for that individual in their personal
earned value schedule.
The new "Remaining Work" mode is a powerful way to rebalance work during a
relaunch. Teams can also use it throughout a project iteration to
continually rebalance work.
- The Process Dashboard now supports baselines for earned value data.
You can save a baseline for any earned value schedule, then view baseline
metrics in the task list and EV charts.
- The WBS Editor now includes support for project milestones:
- It is possible to define a list of project milestones, and
optionally enter commit dates
- Each component and/or task in the WBS can be assigned to a
particular milestone
- Marks appear on the colored balancing bars to indicate when
each individual could potentially finish their work for each
milestone
- The colored balancing bars can be configured to balance work
for the entire project or just for the next milestone(s)
- Future milestones can be marked as "deferred," and the sync
operation will not copy the associated tasks into team member
plans.
- A new icon on the main toolbar makes it easy to attach
free-text notes to any component or task in the Process Dashboard. On a
team project, these notes are shared by the team, and accessible in the WBS
Editor.
- Play and pause now appear as separate toggle buttons.
- A new "timing reminder" feature is available. This feature can
periodically display pop-up alerts, reminding the user to start or stop
their timer or to change the active task. (This feature is not enabled
by default, but can be turned on by individuals who wish to use it. To
enable this feature, right-click on the tray icon and choose "Reminder >
Enable Reminder.")
- The WBS Editor now allows you to enter detailed schedules for each team
member, to include start dates, end dates, and planned time exceptions on
specific weeks. This information is bidirectionally synchronized with each
individual's personal earned value schedule.
- Previously, the WBS Editor would not allow you to assign a task to an
individual until a time estimate had been entered for the task. Now, it is
possible to assign a task to an individual even while the task's time
estimate is still zero. Agile project teams may use this feature to
support on-the-fly cost estimation.
- The Team Dashboard Users Manual is now included in the dashboard's
searchable online help.
- When starting a new project or iteration, you can now bring forward the
data from historical earned value schedules. As a result, the dashboard
can calculate forecast dates and prediction ranges during a team project
launch, even before any actual data has been collected.
- The weekly earned value report now includes a "Tasks In Progress"
section. This section displays tasks that have been started but not yet
completed, making it easier to spot problems such as overspent tasks.
- Historically, "PSP Tasks" were required if a team wanted to capture
planned and actual LOC for their project. Now, LOC can be captured for
"code" tasks as well.
- Installation and operation of the dashboard on Mac OS X is greatly
improved.
- On Unix/Linux systems, the default web browser has been changed from
Netscape to Firefox.
Features new in version 1.9
- The Process Dashboard now displays an icon in the system tray:
- Users can click on the icon to start/stop the timer, and tell from a
glance at the icon whether the timer is running.
- The tooltip on the icon displays the active task. Ctrl-click on the
icon allows the user to select a new active task.
- The popup menu on the tray icon provides quick access to many commonly
used dashboard features.
- In the Team Dashboard, you can now expand the weekly earned value
report to show data for each individual team member. This resulting
report can be very useful in weekly team meetings.
- The play/pause button now displays new icons that make it easier
to determine whether the timer is running or stopped.
- Tasks labels (assigned in the WBS Editor) are now displayed for each
task when you open an earned value plan in the Task & Schedule window
or view a report in your browser.
- Warning icons now appear when a task is planned to be completed
before its dependencies.
- Since version 1.7.1b-9, team members have been able to open the
Work Breakdown Structure directly from their personal dashboard. A
preference on the Team Project Parameters and Settings page controls
whether individuals should be allowed to make changes to the WBS.
Previously, this setting defaulted to "read-only," but with this
release, the default is to allow edits. Teams that wish to
keep the WBS read-only will need to adjust the value of this setting
after upgrading.
- A new project-specific parameter allows teams to disable
(permanently or temporarily) the alerts telling individuals that they
need to sync to the work breakdown structure.
- Several common operations have been optimized, and now require much
less time. For example, the dashboard may start in half the time, and
export data in one-fifth the time.
Features new in version 1.8
- Several enhancements to the team functionality:
- Individuals can now open the team Work Breakdown Structure directly
from their personal dashboard, via a new option on the script menu.
- If an individual needs to perform a "Synchronize to WBS" operation,
they will receive an alert shortly after starting the dashboard.
- It is now possible to view the rolled up time log for team and master
projects.
- The Team Project Parameters and Settings page now allows each team to
select the set of phases they wish to appear in team forms, charts, and
reports.
- It is now possible to define a defect type standard at the team level
for shared use by the members of a team project.
- Several enhancements to earned value support:
- Forecast dates are calculated for every task in the EV schedule.
- A new "Replan" column has been added to the earned value task list,
displaying the planned dates that would result if you were to "replan from
today."
- In addition to the "Chart" button, the Task & Schedule window now
contains a "Filtered Chart" button. This button will display a filtered
view of the earned value charts and statistics, for the selected portion of
the hierarchical task list.
- On the "Combined" earned value chart, the "Actual Time" line has been
replaced with an "Actual Cost" line. With this change, the three lines on
that chart are now displaying traditional BCWS, BCWP, and ACWP
metrics.
- Drag-and-drop can be used to reorder tasks in the Flat View of an
earned value schedule.
- A new option has been added to the "C > Tools" menu, allowing the user to
save a backup of their data directory to a file.
- A new Quick Launcher tool is provided for quickly opening a dashboard
instance without making a shortcut first.
- A new visual indicator has been added to the main Process Dashboard
toolbar, displaying the percent spent for the current task.
- When a user manually enters interrupt time in their time log, the delta
time is now adjusted accordingly.
Features new in version 1.7
- The Process Dashboard now contains extensive, powerful
functionality to support project teams, including:
- Support for team projects (to roll-up metrics and schedule data
from several individuals) and master projects (to roll-up metrics
and schedule data from several teams)
- Streamlined project planning tools enable rapid creation of
balanced, top-down team project plans
- Powerful reporting tools allow the creation of custom forms,
charts, and reports that analyze project metrics and earned value
at the team level
- Tracking of task dependencies assists with coordination of work
within and across project teams
- The Process Dashboard now contains extensive support for
internationalization. A Localization Tool is provided to help
users translate dashboard messages into their native language, and
share those translations with other users.
- Memory usage and startup time have been reduced dramatically for
individuals with many historical projects.
- The dashboard contains several enhancements to earned value
functionality:
- A new task navigation option makes it easier to work through
the tasks in an earned value plan.
- The plan and forecast lines on the earned value charts can be
toggled off.
- The earned value report can display your task list
hierarchically, and display rolled-up calculations such as
"percent complete" at various levels.
- Export a GANTT chart of an earned value plan to MS Project
- Export an HTML snapshot of an earned value plan, for status
reporting and collaboration
- The Data Analysis center has been enhanced to support custom
processes. Users who define a custom process will see customized
versions of Report 3, 4, and 5 for their process.
- The Process Dashboard now integrates with a wide variety of web
browsers on all platforms. In particular, Unix/Linux users no
longer need to use an older version of Netscape to view dashboard
forms.
- The dashboard can be opened in read-only mode, making it possible
for a mentor/coach to look at dashboard data without worrying about
accidentally changing data.
- It is now very safe to use a networked directory for storage of
dashboard data; the logic that saves changes will detect and
recover from sporadic network outages.
- Time values are displayed on dashboard forms in hours and
minutes.
Features new in version 1.6 (released September 1, 2003)
- The dashboard contains several innovative enhancements to earned
value functionality:
- The earned value tool in the dashboard can now calculate
estimated prediction intervals for forecast completion date and
forecast cost. These intervals compare your planned progress to
your actual progress using numerical methods and approximate
pivotal statistics, computing a range of dates within which your
project is likely to finish. The dashboard can calculate these
ranges both for individual earned value schedules and for
rolled-up team schedules.
- Traditional PSP earned value planning addresses only
"direct time," omitting time spent on recurring
activities (such as weekly meetings) and ongoing activities (such
as communicating with customers and management, or participating
on committees). Unfortunately, "direct time" is an
unfamiliar metric for many organizations, which are accustomed to
tracking "project time" instead. As a result, senior
managers in some organizations take issue with earned value plans
that reflect only 15-20 direct hours per week.
To help development teams
avoid this potential misunderstanding, the dashboard now provides
an innovative new feature: "level of effort" tasks can
be added to earned value task lists. Although these tasks don't
affect the earned value calculations, they do allow you to create
a schedule that accounts for all of your "project time"
- and this can help when you present plans to management for
approval. To add "level of effort" tasks to an earned
value plan, just enter percentages for these tasks in the
"planned time" column instead of durations. (Planned
direct time for the periods in the schedule is then calculated
automatically by reducing the planned total time by the
appropriate percentage.) To help you enhance the accuracy of
future estimates, "actual time" for "level of
effort" tasks is also displayed as a percentage.
- Earned value task lists in the dashboard have always been
hierarchically organized. When the list of tasks for a
particular project differs from the structure of your dashboard
hierarchy, new features in the earned value tool allow you to
"prune" and reorder tasks to better describe the work
that needs to be done.
- At times in the middle of a project, you may decide that you
wish to "re-plan" the remaining tasks and start with a
fresh earned value schedule. The dashboard now makes this
simple: just change the starting date on your earned value
schedule to the current date. All work performed before the
starting date of the schedule will be factored out of earned
value calculations automatically.
- The "Data Analysis" center now allows you to generate
custom charts and reports, simply by selecting options from
drop-down lists. The data in these custom charts and reports can
also be exported to Excel for further custom analysis.
- The time log now includes a column for the entry of optional
comments.
- It is now possible to create and edit custom defect type
standards.
Features new in version 1.5 (released October 3, 2002)
- The dashboard is now compatible with version 1.4 and higher of
the Java Runtime Environment.
- The dashboard now contains support for Netscape 6 and higher on
Windows platforms, and is also compatible with the Sun Java Plug-in
in Internet Explorer.
- The task and schedule planning tool now contains built-in support
for collaboration! You can share your schedules with your
co-workers, your manager, and/or your customer, and keep them
up-to-date on your progress. If you are working on a project with
other people, you can roll up your individual schedules to create
an earned value schedule for the project.
- The task and schedule planning tool helps you to avoid several
common planning mistakes.
- The hierarchy editor now includes a toolbar to facilitate the
editing of your work breakdown structure.
- Numerous user interface enhancements make the hierarchy editor,
the time log editor, and the defect log editor easier to use.
Features new in version 1.4 (released February 22, 2002)
- Creating custom processes has never been easier - now you can create
your own process definitions for use with the dashboard by writing a simple
XML file.
- Task and schedule features help you to track your work using earned
value, and calculate forecasts for cost and schedule.
- New "data rollup" templates allow you to roll-up data from
multiple projects. This feature makes it possible to:
- Roll up psp data to the project level.
- Create multiple subsets of "To Date" data (for example, representing
different programming languages). The "To Date" data mechanism now
allows you to select, for each project, which subset should be used for
automatic calculations.
- External documents are now integrated into the process scripts - click
on hyperlinks for documents like the PIP form, the Issue Tracking Log,
etc. and the appropriate document will be opened for the project you're
working on.
- A new "PROBE Wizard" simplifies the PROBE process, and provides advice
on which PROBE method is most appropriate.
- You can now export forms (like the Project Plan Summary or the Size
Estimating Template) to Excel for additional, custom analysis. If you want
to show your data to others, or save copies of forms for project
documentation, you can also export these forms to static HTML
documents.
- You can now "unlock" the read-only data on forms if you want to override
any of the calculations that the dashboard automatically performs for
you.
- The hierarchy editor now allows you to move nodes/projects. Cut and paste
operations make it possible to reorganize your work breakdown structure.
- The drop-down list on the script button now displays choices like
"Project Plan Summary" instead of listing the names of process phases. In
addition, a "script browser" makes it easy to open a script/form for any
project in your hierarchy without needing to navigate to that project
first.
- Checkmarks in the hierarchy menus make it easy to see which phases /
projects have been marked complete.
- The "pspdiff" program (which calculates added / deleted / modified
physical LOC counts) is now incorporated into the dashboard.
- A major overhaul of the internal data calculation engine allows the
dashboard to recalculate data up to 10 times faster.
- If you insert "Design Review" or "Code Review" phases into a PSP0 -
PSP1.1 project, these phases will automatically appear on the project plan
summary and in the process scripts.
- The text "ERROR" in the dashboard forms has been changed to "#VALUE!" or
"#DIV/0!" to behave more like Excel.
- An entry to enter the Total LOC was added to the Size Estimating
Template screen. This only makes sense since you have to enter nearly all
other actual LOC measures on this form.
- Help was implemented via a sub menu. Other items on the Help sub menu
allow you to submit bug reports online and navigate to the user online
help forum.
Features new in version 1.3.1 (released August 14, 2001)
- Version 1.3.1 was released to address a high-priority bug present in
version 1.3. No significant new features were added to 1.3 for this
release.
Features new in version 1.3 (released July 16, 2001)
- The dashboard now includes greatly enhanced online help! Improved help
has been the #1 requested feature by you, the user community. We are
therefore pleased to offer indexed, searchable online help with ten times
the content of version 1.2.
- The dashboard now includes a "Generic" process. When you use the
generic process to perform a task, it allows you to:
- Choose any list of phases, with custom names
- Decide whether or not it makes sense to track defects for the task
- Decide whether or not it makes sense to measure size for the task, and
choose a custom unit of size measurement.
The dashboard then provides a customized Project Plan Summary Form for your
custom process.
- The dashboard now contains a mechanism for freezing baselined data. When
you mark the planning phase of a project complete, all the data in the
"Plan" column of the Project Plan Summary form will freeze and stop
recalculating. Similarly, when you mark the project complete, all the data
in the "To Date" column will freeze and stop recalculating. This makes it
possible to view the report again in the future without having the numbers
changing in the report.
- The dashboard can now notify you when updates are released, either to
the dashboard itself or to the add-on process sets you have installed.
- The PROBE tool now contains a drop-down box for quickly exploring PROBE
methods A, B, and C.
- The Play/Pause button now has a drop-down menu for quickly jumping to a
task where you have recently logged time. If you often bounce back and
forth between tasks for different projects, this feature makes your life
easier.
- Numerous bug fixes make the Time Log Editor more robust.
- The Time Log Editor now makes it easy to quickly filter your view of the
time log to "Today", "This Week", or "This Month". Forward and backward
buttons let you scroll to look at different time periods.
- The play/pause button and the hierarchy menus now provide audible
feedback to help you keep track of whether the dashboard is timing or
paused.
- The previous version of the dashboard would only write entries to the
time log when you changed phases; now, the time log is updated
continually. The data in your time log and your project plan summary forms
is never more than a minute old.
- When you find yourself fixing several defects at once (which can happen
often due to "fix defects" and "related defects"), the dashboard provides
better assistance. It automatically ensures that only one defect timer is
running at a time, and maintains a stack of "interrupted" defects.
- The Defect Log Editor now allows defects to be deleted. It also supports
quick filtering to see the defects which were injected or removed in a
given phase.
- Timer icons have been placed on the HTML forms to allow navigation among
the phases of development without having to reach all the way up to the
hierarchy menus.
- A method was added that will allow driving of the dashboard by another
program. This will allow IDE developers to add support for the
dashboard from within their programming environments.
Features new in version 1.2 (released April 20, 2001)
- The dashboard now includes support for ALL the standard PSP processes
(PSP0, PSP0.1, PSP1.0, PSP1.1, PSP2.0, PSP2.1, and PSP3.0). All of the
online PSP process scripts and forms have been edited to conform as
closely as possible to the originals in the PSP book.
- The dashboard now displays charts and reports! Choose the "Data Analysis"
option on the "C" menu, and dozens of standard charts and reports are
available (including ALL the tables required by reports R3, R4, and R5,
and ALL the charts currently drawn by the SEI's "Student Workbook" Excel
spreadsheet). With a single click, export data to Excel for further
analysis.
- The PROBE tool is now simpler to use. Previously, it would allow you to
explore the correlation between any two data items; unfortunately, this
made it cumbersome for everyday use. Now, by default, it only displays the
data items traditionally used by the PSP PROBE methodology.
- The PSP0 - PSP1.1 processes now support optional "Design Review" and
"Code Review" phases.
- Errors in several calculations have been corrected. Also, the "To Date"
data calculations have been completely revamped and are now working
properly.
- Data calculation efficiency has been improved.
- With the addition of the standard PSP processes, the SCR/DCR processes
are no longer shipped with the dashboard. If are a current dashboard user,
and you have been using the SCR/DCR processes, your existing SCR/DCR
projects WILL still work. If you wish to continue creating projects that
use the SCR/DCR processes in the future, please download the SCR/DCR
process separately.
Features new in version 1.1 (released February 9, 2001)
- Version 1.1 contained enhancements that made the tool significantly
easier to install.