Playground – news and announcements

You know what they say about estimates: it’s just guessing. There is not reliable system that would guarantee you that the effort you imagine a feature to take is  the effort that it actually consumes.

That said, estimating can still be useful.  The client and the vendor can decide that they can accept some uncertainty and that the numbers can be used for planning anyways, whatever their reliability. Or, the team has already so much experience on the particular project that they actually know what they are estimating.

Hence we put estimating in Playground.

It’s as simple as it can be: once a requirement is frozen, anyone can estimate the effort, and the estimate is change-tracked so that the team can learn over time. You will estimate using man-days, the universal currency of software developers. In the near future, the project owner will be able to  convert man-days (MD) to real money as they do in his or her reality. Budgeting etc. will become possible in Playground then.

Like I said, I don’t believe estimating software requirements is possible without allowing for change and revision later in the game, but knowing approximately what a given feature will cost you is very, very useful.

Oh yes, and you can show the estimates on the reports you generate, including other things that were previously unavailable there. How’s that for a nice Easter present?

Nice holidays, everyone!

This week’s small update fixes a long-standing issue: when you navigated to the Things screen, you had no way of knowing what files were uploaded recently. For that you had to click on the RSS feed icon and look in the XML file that, although rendered nicely by modern browsers, isn’t the ideal GUI. The Windows Explorer metaphor clearly didn’t work.

The fix is simple: the default view now ignores folders and lists all the uploaded files from the most recent one.

At the moment our assumption is that most of you won’t be uploading large quantities of files; if you need a content management system, Playground won’t be your pick anyway. For the typical scenario where you have a database of 20-200 product requirements this should be the ideal view. You’ll have client correspondence, mock-ups, perhaps a project plan right there in front of you.

I’ll be happy to hear if you agree or not.

The other, less important change this week was adding paging to the Execute view. You’ll see 2 milestones per page and their contents is now shown without having to click to display it. We are of the opinion that you’ll typically work with the 2 most recent milestones at a time.

Next week might be lighter on updates as we are moving to a new location.

What do all the Excels with product requirements contain? Numbers!

I don’t personally find them very useful but when you are part of a larger team, you might need a short reference to use in an e-mail, and that’s when numerical IDs come in handy.

That’s why we’ve added a number to every idea you post on Playground. You will find it in the URL (such as yourdomain.requirementslist.com/YourProject/120/Title) and you can also search for it – just type the number into the search box.

The downside is that the URLs have changed to accommodate this new feature – the RSS feeds have been updated, so just check your bookmarks in case you’ve added some that link to particular requirements in your project. Please note that numbers are shared among your projects; the sequence is re-started for each one. Hence YourProject/120 and /AnotherProject/120 are two different things.

Bonus: to prevent you from developing a writer’s block, all your ideas are numbered from 100 upwards; as soon as you start with a new project it already feels like you are already on your way (wink).

Perhaps more importantly, we’ve also integrated Playground with the popular Freemind mind-mapping application. Long overdue, this feature lets you work offline in Freemind, explore your ideas, and upload them into Playground later. Tested are versions 0.82 and 0.90 RC6; no promises to support earlier versions at this stage but we’ll support the future versions indefinitely.

Yes, and while we were at it, we tweaked the upload process to also let you re-import OPML files you have generated earlier with the already-supported function for OPML export. We will continue to work on this feature to make sure you can import OPML files generated by other applications – typically mind-mapping programs.

We did a notable release last Saturday but forgot to tell you. Here it comes: Packages, or us we call in on Playground, Feature areas.

When will you use this: whenever your project does more than one type of thing.

Imagine you are developing a reservation system for a travel agency. It deals with customer data, hotel info, transportation info, etc. Each of these things will need to be addressed in the system.

Collecting the product features, you would end up with one giant pile of requirements that would be very difficult to work with.

Feature areas help you drill down into a  specific product domain so that you can keep your focus and, if you are in a team where everyone has a different responsibility, also separate your workload accordingly.

Bonus - a huge one we think – comes at the end. After finalizing the requirements and planning the execution, you can now select a feature area and add all or some of the ideas it contains to an implementation Milestone (Release). That means no longer having to plan each feature individually!

This feature is available under all plans.

Import is here!

This week’s update fixes the “assets” RSS feed that lists all the new file uploads and adds a new feature: import of text files into Playground.

How this will help you:

1. You go to a meeting and open the Notepad / Outlook / whatever you use to take notes
2. People talk about the product and you record the ideas
3. When back online, import the notes into Playground; they are ready to be refined and implemented as required

The final placement of the import control might differ from where it is today, especially if/when we add additional import option: Excel, outlines, etc. Today, click the “POST” icon (the read triangle) in the main screen and proceed from there.

What’s new in Playground as of January 9, 2010:

• Editable comments: you now have 15 minutes to edit your comment after having submitted it. The reasoning behind this feature is that you should be able to correct a mis-spelled word but not go back in time and revise history, Orwell-style (actually, 1984-style). You can delete your old comments instead.
• More detail in notifications and the notifications RSS feed.
• Performance improvements: with a new caching layer in place, Playground is noticeably faster than last week.

Upcoming: some type of import. We’ve supported data export from Day 1 but import is a trickier beast. Loading fat Excel files is out of the question but at a minimum, Playground should be able to re-import files it has produced.

The Use Case I see as most attractive is that I’d export the outline into a Mind Mapping application, play with it there, then commit changes back into Playground. We’ll see what’s possible here.

It’s 2010, and hence we rewind the clock week counter. Like every Saturday, here is a summary of this week’s update:

• Nicer print templates. That’s right – as many noted, the print views looked ‘un-styled’. That’s intentional – you can copy-and-paste into Word and style it according to your taste. Still, a visual refresh felt necessary.
• Less is more - on the Execute view, only the most recent milestone is expanded; all the others are collapsed. In case you want to view the contents of any past milestone, simply click to display it.
• Help pages update. Nothing glamorous, but some questions do repeat often.

Although I am not a big believer in New Year’s resolutions, here is a promise: we will add Packages and sub-Projects very, very soon. Packages are likely to be in all plans whereas sub-Projects might not make it into Garage, alas.

Packages: something like categories, except they can also be used to group features you want to release at the same time. Yes, no longer having to manually schedule every approved requirement!

Sub-Projects: for those among you running projects that span many, many months and have phases, stages, and the like. You are likely to have hundreds of features total that you’re going to implement in phases. Sub-Projects in Playground will enable you to only work with the content of each particular phases, saving you the headache of plowing through all the stuff.