Release Update: Milestones support, Group by at Timeline and Non-Kendis users for Dependencies & Risks
In the last few months, Kendis has increased its focus on providing better capabilities for end users to track the progress of their program increments (PI) and quarterly planning. The timeline is an easy-to-understand view with powerful capabilities to track progress from different dimensions.
With this release, Kendis brings the following new capabilities to the Timeline view.
- Milestones Support
- Group by (Team, Status, Card Type, Jira Custom Fields, Azure AreaPath, and more)
- Ability to set Non-Kendis users as "Responsible" for Risks and Dependencies
All the cross-team features are shown at the bottom based on their groups, e.g., FEA-25 will appear under a
In the following sections, we will briefly explain these new features.
1) Milestones
Milestones are essential in aligning teams towards common goals for your program increment and at the organizational level.
Kendis is introducing new functionality to manage milestones.
Key capabilities
- Define what is your milestone
- Select the date and color of your milestone
- Support for Phases with start and end dates.
- A vertical line to highlight the milestone date.
Linking Milestones to Features
The best way to automatically track the progress of your milestones is to link them to the relevant features. Linking is simple and easy. Click on the milestones to edit it, scroll to the linking sections, search for relevant features, and save it.
To view the progress of your milestones, you can switch to the “Group by” milestones option; with this view, you will be able to understand the % completion of each milestone. The % completion works on the number of user stories completed.
2) Group by
This is a new option at Kendis to visualize your data in different groups. Since it’s a new terminology, let us explain what it is.
Group by is a classic term, it means rather than filtering your data, you split all of your features into relevant groups.
For example, if you select “Group by Team, " Kendis will traverse through all of your features on the board and split them based on the teams working on it. Unplanned features will be added at the bottom as a separate group. This gives enormous power to end users to visualize data and be able to track progress more efficiently.
2.1 ) Following Group By options are available now
a) By Milestones
Show the progress of each milestone based on the linked features. If a feature is linked to both milestones, it will appear on both of them and will contribute to the progress completion of both milestones.
b) By Status
Statuses belong to a category, e.g., “To do”, “In Progress” and “Done”. Kendis will show the grouping based on the status category rather than the actual status, e.g., if you have “UAT Approved” and “Ready for Production” as DONE category statuses then features belonging to these 2 statuses will appear under “Done”
c) By Team (All Stories)
A feature can be worked by multiple teams, when you select this option the feature will all the storeis will appear in both teams, e.g., FEA-25 has 10 stories and is being worked by CRM and DWH teams. When you select this option, FEA-25 will appear in both teams with 10 stories.
By Team (Planned Stories)
With this option, our example above, FEA-25 will appear in both teams, however, this time only with the relevant stories., e.g, FEA-25 has 3 stories being worked by CRM team and 5 storeis by Team DWH.
When you expand CRM team, you will only see 3 stories related to FEA-25
This is a great way to see the actual progress of the team.
5) By Team (cross-team)
There can be a situation where you want to see which features are being worked by multiple teams separately. This option is useful if you are mainly working on the per team features rather than cross team.
When you select this option, Kendis will only show the features that are solely working by a single team
All the cross-team features are shown at the bottom based on their groups, e.g., FEA-25 will appear under a separate group “CRM/DWH” as both teams are working on it FEA-15 and others will appear under CRM team but FEA-25 will not
d) By Card type
If you are using Kendis card types, this view will provide the progress and grouping of each card type, e.g., list of Enablers and their cumulative progress.
2.2 For Jira Boards
Jira board provides “Additoinal fields” option, where you can configure upto 5 customl fields from Jira for features and user stories, e.g., we have configured
- Fix Version
- Kendis Team
- Priority
- Components
- Label
If I want to see how we are doing for a particular Fix version in this PI then by selecting that option, you can get a precise % completion.
2.3) For Azure DevOps Boards
The following two options are only available to these boards
By AreaPath
This is for the feature areapath. In situations where you have defined feature owner teams based on the AreaPath, you can use this grouping feature to view all of your features divided across different AreaPaths.
By Parent-Epic
When you fetch features into Kendis if there is a link to the higher-level Epics then Kendis stores that information automatically.
When you select this grouping, you can see the progress of the Epic features that are on your current Kendis Board
3) Other Enhancements
Although the main theme of this release is to provide new capabilities to the Timeline view, there are still a couple of valuable enhancements rolled out in this release.
3.1) Setting Responsible to Non-Kendis users
Previously you could only use Kendis licensed users to assign “Risks” and “Dependencies” as owners. This was hindering the process as not all the users are in Kendis. Now you are able to search the users from your Agile tool, like Jira or Azure DevOps and assign the respective things to them.
Please note once you search for the user from your Agile tool or create new one, it will be added as “Non-Kendis” user. Next time they will be readily available for usage, and you don’t have to search from the Jira or ADO again.
To manage these users, you must be Super Admin and access the settings → Non-Kendis users directory.
3.2) Admin Experience Improvements for Confidence Voting
A few of our customers reported that from the UI, it wasn’t easily understandable if the confidence voting process is ongoing, why the results are not visible to all users.
Kendis now shows a top bar with the clear actions that need to be taken by the admins, e.g., to start the voting process and to end the voting process
3.3) Export Analytics
On some of the views, options to export the data were missing. It is now available.
3.4) Inspect & Adapt Updates
There are a few minor fixes done for I&A module
- Teams are ordered under PPM based on the current board (previously, it was randomly selected)
- There is a Green bar to highlight 80-100 areas of the Objectives achievement
- Dedicated Graph for the Program ART achievement for the Business Value
As a future enhancement in the next release, you will be able to select more than one team to compare against the average of the Program (ART), kind of the same functionality as SAFe PPM
3.5) Important General Fixes
- Dependency-related fixes: In some cases, when you resynced, the dependency line was still showing red, although the items have been marked as done. This is now fixed and once you resync and if the status of the cards belongs to the Done category, then the line will turn green.
- For Azure DevOps, if the Areapath of a team belongs to the Team mapping, then it will not be changed to the “Default AreaPath” on the drag n drop. Previously, if you had 3 Areapaths mapped to a team and upon dragging a story from Backlog to a sprint, Kendis was changing it to “Default Areapath”, it will no longer happen if the source Areapath belongs to one of the mapped Areapaths.
Kendis Enterprise - Self-Hosted Version Details
Minor Build Updates with fixes: 01 December 2022
Build Version: 7bbd68aa115b77005c8a34828989237bcbe5c85c
Version: 202007-3.2.1.9.9.3-p
----------
Build Version: a8ceb27c14f394eafa81ebcdcf4a974f37770de7
Version: 202007-3.2.1.9.9.2-p
How to get the latest version?
An updated version is available at
For any questions, reach out to us at support@kendis.io
