It's fast, it's fun.  It powers your planning.  It tames your tickets.  It's the upgraded Agile Planner, our AJAX interface for adding tickets, building stories with tasks, and scheduling them into milestones, iterations, or releases.  For more details, please watch the video, or just select the “Agile Planner” link in the Tickets tool menu, and try it.

During the last year, many users have told me that they use the agile planner every week with their team.  So what is NEW in the Agile Planner this month? 

* It’s fast.  Drag and drop is smooth.  All tickets are loaded into local memory for instant access.  New layouts for “Milestone | Detail” and “Story | Detail” remove EVERY CLICK between mousover and seeing the detail edit form.

* Open tasks and subtasks to unlimited depth, in the Story/Feature column.  This “hierarchical ticket view” was one of our most requested features, with over 300 votes.

* Enter a list of tasks with the same attributes, using a new pop-up UI.

* In-place editing of estimates.  Just click on the number and edit.  The estimates add up correctly for complete features or milestones.

Incremental development is important

The Agile planner will help you with roadmapping, which I described in my article "Save the best for first".  It's a simple way to get what you want, fast, using incremental development.  We write down everything we want to do, and then we sort it by priority, and we try to find the minimum set of high-priority stuff that will get us a great release as soon as possible. 

A whole industry has grown up around incremental development, represented by Agile, minimum releasable product, lean startups, and even behemoths like Linux, which started as a student project. 

Sometimes, a planning view can be one of the biggest obstacles to this process.  If you write a view of your project that shows a feature listed under a milestone or release, and subtasks for that feature, it starts to force you into thinking that you need to finish everything before you can release.  You start to forget that you are in charge, and that you can release a simple version before you release the complete version.  In the Agile Planner, we separate the your grand plan in the Story/Feature view, from the schedule in the Milestones view.

How can you use the Agile Planner?

Use it with a client or business owner to launch a project.  It’s fun to see a plan take shape, which builds the relationship.  If you run a good roadmapping session, you get a big head start on the implementation, which is the biggest revenue earner. 

Use it with your team to plan iterations.  Many Assembla users sit down as a group with the agile planner each week or each month.  I have seen distributed teams do this with screen sharing tools.

Distribute planning.  I like to create a top-level story, and then ask the developer to fill in more detailed tasks.  It makes the developer feel more confident, and it makes the work more visible.

Many of our users like to sort their tasks into a very specific order.  Agile Planner gives you that control.

Here's a quick video of the Agile Planner, so you can see it in action.