Project Cards

Hey guys,

we’re pleased to be launching the public release of ProjectCards 2.7 today ! This marks our fourth release in the past ten weeks. We are very proud of the rhythm at which we have been able to make our new features and improvement available to our customers.

ProjectCards 2.7 marks the introduction of a brand new view for your projects. Using our Scrum Template you now have access to these views :

• Product Backlog
• Planning
• StoryBoard (For the current iteration)
• TaskBoard(For the current iteration)

Of course, you still have access to your generated burnup and burndown charts.

Our new TaskBoard allows the entire team to keep track of the sprint’s progress at the task-level. As always, the display is updated in real time ! Meaning that when a teammate updates the status of a card, all of the other team members see it being changed live !

For a sneek peek of our new TaskBoard, checkout our screenshots. Of course, the best way to enjoy our new TaskBoard is to give ProjectCards 2.7 a try.

Stay tuned for ProjectCards 2.8 that will include the tasks burndown and burnup charts!

The ProjectCards team.

Hey folks,

as you might of noticed,  since the end of this spring, ProjectCards has completely redesigned its website, it has been releasing more and more frequently and has been even more involved in the Agile community.

A lot of this was made possible by a partnership we have made earlier this year with Pyxis Technologies. Pyxis has been a great partner thus far, lending us a great hand in sharing their thorough knowledge and experience with Agile methodologies. They have also helped us kick start our marketing skills which were greatly lacking. Finally, many of Pyxis’ team members, myself included, have contributed to making ProjectCards a better product.

In return, ProjectCards is giving Pyxis another tool in their Agile project management tools arsenal alongside UrbanTurtle which is geared towards Microsoft’s TFS market.

Having proved its place in the Agile market for the past 5 years, ProjectCards also solidifies Pyxis’ pioneer stand in the Agile community since it was started by current Pyxis employees over 6 years ago. This was done at a time when most people in the industry were not even aware that Agile methodologies existed.

Where will this partnership take us ? Who knows ? Maybe Pyxis will recreate GreenHopper’s success story once more. Stay tuned to find out, it should be a heck of a ride.

Nicholas on behalf of the entire ProjectCards team.

Hey folks,

for the past few months, we’ve been in contact with the Illinois Regional Agile Users Group. Recently they have completely revamped their website. In order to manage their backlog, they have asked us to give them a free license of ProjectCards. We kindly did so.

So far the feedback we have gotten has been tremendously positive. Some people in the community have liked working with ProjectCards so much that they have since recommended us to some of their own consulting clients. Amongst other things, they really liked the simplicity of getting started with ProjectCards. They also enjoyed the instantaneous user feedback.

As our long time users can tell you, having your taskboard and planningboard updated in real-time when someone else makes a change is an awesome feature to have when you have a distributed teams. ProjectCards can also be used directly within Eclipse or Aptana as a plugin. Perfect to keep us developers involved !

If you represent an Agile, Scrum or a developer’s user group and need a free tool to manage your activities, drop us an email at support@projectcards.com. We are always looking forwards giving back to the Agile community.

If you’re in the region of Illinois, we’d like to invite you to check out IRAUG. You can get in touch with either Maria Matarelli or Scotty Bevill of BevillEdge who are its very friendly organizers.

The ProjectCards team.

Hey guys,

a couple of weeks ago we started gathering massive customer feedback from our customer base. Actually, we went so far as to search for every potential customer we ever met and who ever downloaded ProjectCards without buying it and plainly asked them this question : “What did you think of ProjectCards ?”.

The reception we got was somewhat surprising. A LOT of people we had not heard of in years gave us some very candid and useful feedback on our application. A few people really did not like our products. That happens. However, a LOT of non-buyers actually LOVED our products. It just missed a little something to make a match between us.

We actually learned a lot from this whole activity. We also had a great time exchanging with you guys.

We’d like to thank everyone who gave us feedback. We’ll do the best we can to include your suggestions in the upcoming releases.

For the curious, here are a few quotes we got from people who did not even buy ProjectCards :

“We found ProjectCards extremely useful in planning our small project. If I were to end up in another Eclipse-based project that warranted such planning and activity management, I’d certainly recommend we use ProjectCards.”

“I really appreciate your continuous follow up with customers too, cause it
present your good and professional work.”

“We used ProjectCards at the start of one project. The project developers and management were very happy with it, but ….
sadly, our company standardized on [...]. We’re not as happy with it.”

“I was happy with the product. I used it at my last job. At my current position, they have chosen to use[...]”

“I think we are overall quite fine with it. We found the
burndown charts not that straight forward to understand. I guess that’s it.”

“Our biggest need was for a web tool. Sorry.”

“I really like your product, ProjectCards. I downloaded it with the intent to use to keep track of one man show projects.[...] Seeing that I only intend on one person using the product then there seem no overwhelming to purchase it.”

Hey folks,

long story short. We messed up part of our 2.6 release we publicized Monday. Sorry about that. We’re releasing 2.6.0.1 as a fix as we speak. The issue was discovered earlier this morning and had been introduced in our packaging since last Friday.

As far as the technical details go :

• We run our automated tests against our build before we launch our private release
• We obfuscate our code and package the whole thing and ship our private release to our beta testing sites
• Our testing sites use it for at least a week
• If they give us a go, we make it public
• Even with all of these precautions, a bug slipped through. It seems our test site had almost stopped using our server side reporting recently. A new file that was required in the server-side reports was not included in the obfuscated package.

We’re sorry about all the trouble this might have caused. Coming from this experience we now have these action points to address:

• We need to figure out a way to automatically test out our obfuscated build
• We need more thorough testing from our test sites
• As a bonus, we’ve learned that our reporting features were underused by our close customers. We need to sit down with them and figure out why.

Once again, sorry about the trouble. This release process is also a learning process.

- The entire ProjectCards team.

Hey folks,

just wanted to let you in behind the scenes during the development of ProjectCards 2.7. We’ve just started working on implementing a real taskboard !

This means that users will still have access to both a story board where they can visually see the progress of the different stories the team has committed to for the current sprint.

However, there will now be a new view that allows users to see the progress of the differents tasks the teams has to accomplish in order to meet their sprint’s objective !

This should be a more than welcome addition to all the ProjectCards’ user who have asked us to implement this feature !

Stay tune for the announcement of the release date of ProjectCards2.7.

-Nicholas Lemay

Hey folks,

just 2 weeks after releasing version 2.5 and 4 weeks after releasing 2.4, we’re back again to release ProjectCards 2.6

Here are the main added benefits :

• Added support for iteration length to be set in days
• Added the support to change the end date of a sprint at anytime
• Added the possibility to set the default sprint length in days
• For more details, checkout the change log.

This should help fast-releasing teams manage their sprints. This will also be helpful for teams with sprint length that are variable or that cannot be expressed in weeks as usually seen in the Agile literature.

Once again, the best way to benefit from these features is to give ProjectCards 2.6 a try !

We’ll be back again soon enough with an update on the upcoming ProjectCards 2.7 !

-Nicholas Lemay

Hey guys,

as you might of seen, we’ve been seeding up our delivery cycle in the past few weeks for the kicks of it. It been pretty fun, plus a lot of you guys seem to like the frequent updates.

Next week, we will be releasing ProjectCards 2.6 which will mark our third release in 6 weeks. This release will include a new feature that will allow fast-releasing teams to set up their sprint by days instead of weeks. We’ve seen teams take this approach so far as to release every day ! We think this is awesome and wanted to support you guys with ProjectCards. While you might not go to these extremes, we’re sure a lot of you will enjoy the fact that we now support sprints of any length !

Keep up the great work and stay tuned for the release of ProjectCards 2.6.

-Nicholas Lemay

Hey guys,

just two weeks after releasing ProjectCards 2.4 we are releasing ProjectCards 2.5. This is a minor update over 2.4 but we wanted to share it with you guys as quickly as possible. An Agile team, building a tool for the Agile community that’s doing frequent releases. What a novel idea

Here are the main updates this version brings :

• The reports have been fixed for Internet Explorer. They were especially broken on Internet Explorer 8.
• Fixed a bug in the capacity feature caused by Java’s support for Time zones. Many thanks to our friends in Europe who discovered this hidden bug !
• Our trial period has been lowered from 60 days to 30 days.
• Minor alignment fixes.
• Other minor visual enhancements.(Typos fixed, etc.)

Looking forward to releasing ProjectCards 2.6 in the next few weeks. Stay tuned for more details ! In the meantime,  give ProjectCards 2.5 a try and give us your feedback !

–Nicholas Lemay