processdash-announce

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard 2.7 is Now Available

[<pro...@li...>]

The Process Dashboard development team is pleased to announce the
availability of version 2.7 of the Process Dashboard. To download version
2.7, visit:
https://www.processdash.com/download

Version 2.7 includes many significant new features, including the ability
to create custom size metrics, support for team collaboration via cloud
storage providers (such as OneDrive, DropBox, and Google Drive), and more.
For a full list of features and changes, see:
https://www.processdash.com/process-dashboard-2-7/

*Upgrade Considerations*

Teams are encouraged to upgrade together. Some features may not work
properly until all team members have upgraded, and exported their data at
least once.

For questions about the Process Dashboard, please contact the development
team at:
pro...@li...

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard 2.6 is Now Available

[<pro...@li...>]

 The Process Dashboard development team is pleased to announce the
availability of version 2.6 of the Process Dashboard. To download version
2.6, visit:
https://www.processdash.com/download

Version 2.6 includes many significant new features, including personal
projects for independent work, streamlined size data management, and
integration with Jira, TFS, and Azure. For a full list of features and
changes, see:
https://www.processdash.com/changelog_version_2_6

The Process Dashboard is a community-powered open-source application. The
new features in version 2.6 were made possible by organizations like yours,
that generously provided requirements feedback, development contributions,
and financial support. If you have ideas for new features/enhancements,
please contact the development team at:
pro...@li...

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard 2.5 is Now Available

[<pro...@li...>]

The Process Dashboard development team is pleased to announce the
availability of version 2.5 of the Process Dashboard. To download version
2.5, visit:
https://www.processdash.com/download

Version 2.5 includes many significant new features, including a refreshed
visual theme, "zoom" in the WBS editor, quality planning for workflows, and
prototype integration with TFS and Visual Studio. For a full list of
features and changes, see:
https://www.processdash.com/pdash_2_5

The Process Dashboard is a community-powered open-source application. The
new features in version 2.5 were made possible by organizations like yours,
that generously provided requirements feedback, development contributions,
and financial support. If you have ideas for new features/enhancements,
please contact the development team at:
pro...@li...

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard 2.4 is Now Available

[<pro...@li...>]

The Process Dashboard development team is pleased to announce to
availability of version 2.4 of the Process Dashboard. To download version
2.4, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/download

Version 2.4 includes these significant new features:

   - 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
      customizations 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.
   - Fixes are included for a number of bugs.

*Upgrade Considerations*

   - Teams are encouraged to upgrade together. Some features may not work
   properly until all team members have upgraded, and exported their data at
   least once.

*Download*

For more information, or to download the Process Dashboard, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/


PSP(SM) and TSP(SM) are service marks of Carnegie Mellon University. The
open source team that writes the Process Dashboard is not affiliated with
Carnegie Mellon University. Neither Carnegie Mellon University nor the
Software Engineering Institute have reviewed or endorsed the Process
Dashboard.

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard 2.3 is Now Available

[<pro...@li...>]

The Process Dashboard development team is pleased to announce to
availability of version 2.3 of the Process Dashboard. To download version
2.3, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/download

Version 2.3 includes these significant new features:

   - 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
      opportunities 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® or iPad®
   (AndroidTM support coming soon). (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 re-enable 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.
   - Fixes are included for a number of bugs.

*Upgrade Considerations*

   - Teams are encouraged to upgrade together. Some features may not work
   properly until all team members have upgraded, and exported their data at
   least once.

*Download*

For more information, or to download the Process Dashboard, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/


PSP(SM) and TSP(SM) are service marks of Carnegie Mellon University. The
open source team that writes the Process Dashboard is not affiliated with
Carnegie Mellon University. Neither Carnegie Mellon University nor the
Software Engineering Institute have reviewed or endorsed the Process
Dashboard.

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard Mobile App - Survey

[<pro...@li...>]

The Process Dashboard is an open source application for project planning
and tracking. It provides excellent support for high-maturity project
teams, but it only runs on "desktop" computers.

With the growing popularity of mobile devices, individuals could benefit
from the ability to perform some project planning/tracking tasks from a
smartphone or tablet.

To that end, a project team is working to develop a mobile application that
would act as a companion to the Process Dashboard, making it possible to
perform a number of common tasks from a mobile device when you are away
from your computer.

To make that application as useful as possible, the team is conducting a
survey of user needs and requirements. If you would be interested in making
use of this mobile app, the team would appreciate hearing your thoughts:
http://www.processdash.com/mobile

To ensure that the app provides the most value for your team, please invite
your coworkers to complete this survey too.

Thank you very much for your feedback!


-- The Process Dashboard Development Team

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard 2.2 is Now Available

[<pro...@li...>]

The Process Dashboard development team is pleased to announce to
availability of version 2.2 of the Process Dashboard. To download version
2.2, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/download

Version 2.2 includes these significant new features:

   - 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
   - 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.

*Upgrade Considerations*

   - Teams are encouraged to upgrade together. Some features may not work
   properly until all team members have upgraded, and exported their data
   at least once.
   - 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.

*Download*

For more information, or to download the Process Dashboard, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/


PSP(SM) is a service mark of Carnegie Mellon University. The open source
team that writes the Process Dashboard is not affiliated with Carnegie
Mellon University. Neither Carnegie Mellon University nor the Software
Engineering Institute have reviewed or endorsed the Process Dashboard.

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard 2.1 is Now Available

[<pro...@li...>]

The Process Dashboard development team is pleased to announce to
availability of version 2.1 of the Process Dashboard. To download version
2.1, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/

Version 2.1 includes these significant new features:

   - 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.



*Upgrade Considerations*

   - Teams are encouraged to upgrade together. Some features may not work
   properly until all team members have upgraded, and exported their data
   at least once.
   - Teams using the built-in metrics collection framework will enjoy this
   functionality simply by upgrading. Teams that have defined their own custom
   metrics collection framework will need to refresh the definition
   <http://www.tuma-solutions.com/metricsFrameworkEditor.html#upgrading> of
   that framework to receive some of the enhancements listed above.


*Download*

For more information, or to download the Process Dashboard, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/


PSP(SM) is a service mark of Carnegie Mellon University. The open source
team that writes the Process Dashboard is not affiliated with Carnegie
Mellon University. Neither Carnegie Mellon University nor the Software
Engineering Institute have reviewed or endorsed the Process Dashboard.

[Processdash-announce] Training Opportunity

[<pro...@li...>]

The Process Dashboard development team is pleased to announce a valuable
and unprecedented training opportunity.

A full-day tutorial will be provided on Monday, November 3rd, 2014,
covering both basic and advanced usage of the Team Process Dashboard.  This
hands-on tutorial will be led by David Tuma, the creator of the Process
Dashboard. An overview of the tutorial is provided at the end of this
message.

This tutorial will be held in conjunction with the 2014 TSP(SM) Symposium
in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Visit <http://www.sei.cmu.edu/tspsymposium/> for
more information and to register.

Don't miss this exciting opportunity to accelerate your organization's
process improvement efforts. Feel free to contact the Process Dashboard
development team with any questions. We look forward to seeing you there!


------------------------------

Empowering Teams with Great Data: Using the Process Dashboard

Successful project management leverages well-chosen tools to establish an
empowered culture. Accordingly, tool expertise (or lack thereof) can either
be a key enabler or a limiting factor for the speed and effectiveness of
your process improvement efforts. This tutorial shows participants how to
perform many fundamental and advanced project management techniques using
the open-source Process Dashboard application.

The session is designed to benefit a broad range of individuals:

   - Those new to the Dashboard wishing to jump start their training and
   ability
   - Experienced users of Dashboard seeking a higher level of mastery

Prior use of the Process Dashboard is helpful but not required.

Participants will be provided with the mindset, experience and skills to
use the tool more effectively so their teams and organizations can work
smarter, with less overhead.

Tutorial topics will include:

   1. Team Planning (Launch)
      - Preparing for a successful project launch
      - Leveraging dashboard functionality to empower and accelerate team
      planning efforts
      2. Team Working
      - Collecting data, managing team and personal plans, and facilitating
      team work
      - Understanding, using, and customizing reports to monitor team
      progress, pinpoint project problems, and report to management
      3. Postmortem and Replan (Relaunch)
   4. Deeper Understanding
      - Insight into the underlying data and tool architecture greatly
      accelerates mastery and usage of the Dashboard
      5. Advanced Topics
      - Tips and tricks for using the Dashboard faster and more effectively
      - Advanced features for high-maturity teams

Attendees will gain the skills, mindset, and experience to:

   - Use the Process Dashboard confidently during TSP launches
   - Use the tool more effectively and work smarter, with less overhead
   - Apply advanced techniques for project planning and tracking
   - Transition these skills to others in their organization

Attendees who can bring a laptop computer will benefit from hands-on
experience as they follow along with the live demonstrations.

------------------------------
TSP(SM) is a service mark of Carnegie Mellon University.

[Processdash-announce] Training Opportunity

[<pro...@li...>]

The Process Dashboard development team is pleased to announce a valuable
and unprecedented training opportunity.

A full-day tutorial will be provided on Monday, November 3rd, 2014,
covering both basic and advanced usage of the Team Process Dashboard.  This
hands-on tutorial will be led by David Tuma, the creator of the Process
Dashboard. An overview of the tutorial is provided at the end of this
message.

This tutorial will be held in conjunction with the 2014 TSP(SM) Symposium
in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Visit <http://www.sei.cmu.edu/tspsymposium/> for
more information and to register. Seating is limited, so interested
attendees are encouraged to register as early as possible.

Don't miss this exciting opportunity to accelerate your organization's
process improvement efforts. Feel free to contact the Process Dashboard
development team with any questions. We look forward to seeing you there!


------------------------------

Empowering Teams with Great Data: Using the Process Dashboard

Successful project management leverages well-chosen tools to establish an
empowered culture. Accordingly, tool expertise (or lack thereof) can either
be a key enabler or a limiting factor for the speed and effectiveness of
your process improvement efforts. This tutorial shows participants how to
perform many fundamental and advanced project management techniques using
the open-source Process Dashboard application.

The session is designed to benefit a broad range of individuals:

   - Those new to the Dashboard wishing to jump start their training and
   ability
   - Experienced users of Dashboard seeking a higher level of mastery

Prior use of the Process Dashboard is helpful but not required.

Participants will be provided with the mindset, experience and skills to
use the tool more effectively so their teams and organizations can work
smarter, with less overhead.

Tutorial topics will include:

   1. Team Planning (Launch)
      - Preparing for a successful project launch
      - Leveraging dashboard functionality to empower and accelerate team
      planning efforts
      2. Team Working
      - Collecting data, managing team and personal plans, and facilitating
      team work
      - Understanding, using, and customizing reports to monitor team
      progress, pinpoint project problems, and report to management
      3. Postmortem and Replan (Relaunch)
   4. Deeper Understanding
      - Insight into the underlying data and tool architecture greatly
      accelerates mastery and usage of the Dashboard
      5. Advanced Topics
      - Tips and tricks for using the Dashboard faster and more effectively
      - Advanced features for high-maturity teams

Attendees will gain the skills, mindset, and experience to:

   - Use the Process Dashboard confidently during TSP launches
   - Use the tool more effectively and work smarter, with less overhead
   - Apply advanced techniques for project planning and tracking
   - Transition these skills to others in their organization

Attendees who can bring a laptop computer will benefit from hands-on
experience as they follow along with the live demonstrations.

------------------------------
TSP(SM) is a service mark of Carnegie Mellon University.

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard 2.0 -- Team Process Data Warehouse

[<pro...@li...>]

Thank you to the many people who have already downloaded Team Dashboard 2.0!

As we look to the future, we would greatly appreciate your feedback on the
improvements you would most like to see in the Process Dashboard, and the
types of training you feel would be most helpful. Please share your
thoughts in our brief survey:
http://www.processdash.com/survey2.0

For those who missed the original release announcement, it is included
again below.

------------------------------

We are proud to announce the newest release of the Process Dashboard tool
suite. This release includes
many<http://www.processdash.com/changelog_version_2_0>new features;
the most important is that we are unleashing
data to a whole new level of usage - and future promise.

Teams using the TSP(SM) are exceptional due to the richness of the
datathey collect.  But up to now, as a community we have mostly been
limiting
our use of this data to simple, one-project-at-a-time analyses.  To a large
extent, this has been unavoidable because the data has been held up inside
the various tools we use.

This release changes that paradigm with the introduction of the Team Process
Data Warehouse <http://www.processdash.com/tpidw>.

The Team Process Data Warehouse is the result of several years of analysis
and design.  It is designed to hold data from any number of high-maturity
project teams across one or more organizations.  The data structure is
designed to allow fast, expressive queries across vast amounts of project
data.  It is not process- or domain-specific, so it can be used to analyze
data collected by teams that do not write software. And it has been
explicitly designed to be tool-agnostic, to allow the merging of data from
multiple different data sources and tools (not just the Process Dashboard).

At the team level, this creates a wealth of new opportunities for custom
reporting and analysis.  To this end, a lightweight version of the
warehouseis now embedded in
Team Dashboard 2.0.  This embedded warehouse provides SQL-queryable access
to the data for a single team, across all the various projects and project
iterations they have performed.  As always, this team level experience is
available free of charge. To download, visit
http://www.processdash.com/download

The ROI increases exponentially at the organizational level, where the Team
Process Data Warehouse opens the door to a new era of possibilities for
reporting, analysis, data mining, and data integration.  To take advantage
of these opportunities, organizations can deploy the Process Dashboard
Enterprise Server <http://www.processdash.com/pdes>.  This paid-for feature
set enables organizations to increase the impact of their data usage and
decrease the labor they need to realize it.  Contact Tuma
Solutions<pd...@tu...>for more information.

As a demonstration of this new power, the existing charts and reports in
the Team Dashboard have been reengineered to pull data from the lightweight
embedded data warehouse. Benchmarks show some reports appearing 100 to 1000
times faster than before.  The Team Dashboard also starts up and shuts down
many times faster.

But these changes are just the beginning.  The real power/opportunity comes
next, as the entire community can begin using off-the-shelf analysis and
reporting products to develop new/custom charts, reports, data analysis and
data mining tools. The team and organizational warehouses share the same
schema, allowing vertical reusability of these newly created reports and
tools.  Organizations that are willing to share their creations with the
rest of the community can receive design and analysis support from the
Process Dashboard development team <pro...@li...>
.

As part of this new paradigm of the Process Dashboard, we are also making a
number of new learning opportunities available to the community.

Looking forward to the exciting road ahead,


*David Tuma*
Process Dashboard Architect
Tuma Solutions, LLC


------------------------------
TSP(SM) is a service mark of Carnegie Mellon University. The open source
team that writes the Process Dashboard is not affiliated with Carnegie
Mellon University. Neither Carnegie Mellon University nor the Software
Engineering Institute have reviewed or endorsed the Process Dashboard.

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard 2.0 -- Team Process Data Warehouse

[<pro...@li...>]

I am proud to announce the newest release of the Process Dashboard tool
suite. This release includes
many<http://www.processdash.com/changelog_version_2_0>new features;
the most important is that we are unleashing data to a whole
new level of usage - and future promise.

Teams using the TSP(SM) are exceptional due to the richness of the data
they collect.  But up to now, as a community we have mostly been limiting
our use of this data to simple, one-project-at-a-time analyses.  To a large
extent, this has been unavoidable because the data has been held up inside
the various tools we use.

This release changes that paradigm with the introduction of the Team
Process Data Warehouse <http://www.processdash.com/tpidw>.

The Team Process Data Warehouse is the result of several years of analysis
and design.  It is designed to hold data from any number of high-maturity
project teams across one or more organizations.  The data structure is
designed to allow fast, expressive queries across vast amounts of project
data.  It is not process- or domain-specific, so it can be used to analyze
data collected by teams that do not write software. And it has been
explicitly designed to be tool-agnostic, to allow the merging of data from
multiple different data sources (not just the Process Dashboard).

At the team level, this creates a wealth of new opportunities for custom
reporting and analysis.  To this end, a lightweight version of the
warehouse is now embedded in Team Dashboard 2.0.  This embedded warehouse
provides SQL-queryable access to the data for a single team, across all the
various projects and project iterations they have performed.  As always,
this team level experience is available free of charge. To download, visit
http://www.processdash.com/download

The ROI increases exponentially at the organizational level, where the Team
Process Data Warehouse opens the door to a new era of possibilities for
reporting, analysis, data mining, and data integration.  To take advantage
of these opportunities, organizations can deploy the Process Dashboard
Enterprise Server <http://www.processdash.com/pdes>.  This paid-for feature
set enables organizations to increase the impact of their data usage and
decrease the labor they need to realize it.  Contact Tuma
Solutions<pd...@tu...>for more information.

As a demonstration of this new power, the existing charts and reports in
the Team Dashboard have been reengineered to pull data from the lightweight
embedded data warehouse. Benchmarks show some reports appearing 100 to 1000
times faster than before.  The Team Dashboard also starts up and shuts down
many times faster.

But these changes are just the beginning.  The real power/opportunity comes
next, as the entire community can begin using off-the-shelf analysis and
reporting products to develop new/custom charts, reports, data analysis and
data mining tools. The team and organizational warehouses share the same
schema, allowing vertical reusability of these newly created reports and
tools.  Organizations that are willing to share their creations with the
rest of the community can receive design and analysis support from the
Process Dashboard development team <pro...@li...>
.

As part of this new paradigm of the Process Dashboard, we are also making a
number of new learning opportunities available to the community.

As we embark on this next phase of the high-maturity process improvement
journey, we would greatly appreciate your feedback.  I invite you to take a
quick survey (estimated time less than 7 minutes) that will help guide me
in providing the most value to you. Your feedback is very important, so I
will be sending another survey reminder in two weeks.
http://www.processdash.com/survey2.0

Looking forward to the exciting road ahead,


*David Tuma*
 Process Dashboard Architect
Tuma Solutions, LLC


------------------------------
TSP(SM) is a service mark of Carnegie Mellon University. The open source
team that writes the Process Dashboard is not affiliated with Carnegie
Mellon University. Neither Carnegie Mellon University nor the Software
Engineering Institute have reviewed or endorsed the Process Dashboard.

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard 1.15 is Now Available

[<pro...@li...>]

The Process Dashboard development team is pleased to announce the
availability of version 1.15 of the Process Dashboard.  To download version
1.15, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/

Version 1.15 includes these significant new features:

   - 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.

*
Upgrade Considerations*

   - Teams are encouraged to upgrade together. Some features may not work
   properly until all team members have upgraded, and exported their data
   at least once.
   - Teams using the built-in metrics collection framework will enjoy this
   functionality simply by upgrading. Teams that have defined their own custom
   metrics collection framework will need to refresh the
definition<http://www.tuma-solutions.com/metricsFrameworkEditor.html#upgrading>of
that framework to receive some of the enhancements listed above.

*
Download*

For more information, or to download the Process Dashboard, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/



PSP(SM) is a service mark of Carnegie Mellon University. The open source
team that writes the Process Dashboard is not affiliated with Carnegie
Mellon University. Neither Carnegie Mellon University nor the Software
Engineering Institute have reviewed or endorsed the Process Dashboard.

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard 1.14 is Now Available

[<pro...@li...>]

The Process Dashboard development team is pleased to announce the
availability of version 1.14 of the Process Dashboard.  To download version
1.14, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/

Version 1.14 includes these significant new features:

   - 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.


*Upgrade Considerations*

   - Teams are encouraged to upgrade together. Some features may not work
   properly until all team members have upgraded, and exported their data at
   least once.
   - Teams using the built-in metrics collection framework will enjoy this
   functionality simply by upgrading. Teams that have defined their own custom
   metrics collection framework will need to refresh the
definition<http://www.tuma-solutions.com/metricsFrameworkEditor.html#upgrading>of
that framework.

*
Download*

For more information, or to download the Process Dashboard, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/



PSP(SM) is a service mark of Carnegie Mellon University. The open source
team that writes the Process Dashboard is not affiliated with Carnegie
Mellon University. Neither Carnegie Mellon University nor the Software
Engineering Institute have reviewed or endorsed the Process Dashboard.

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard 1.13 is Now Available

[<pro...@li...>]

The Process Dashboard development team is pleased to announce the
availability of version 1.13 of the Process Dashboard.  To download version
1.13, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/

Version 1.13 includes these significant new features:

   - 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" or "PSP" task in that workflow will automatically
      inherit that LOC 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 perform more intuitive, spreadsheet-like
behaviors when the
      focus is not in the first column.
      - The Task Size Units column now supports autocompletion.
      - The semantics of the "%" column have changed for tasks in a workflow
      that are performed by more than one person. Please consult the help
      documentation for more information.
   - 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.
      - A strikethrough font is now used to indicate tasks that are 100%
      complete.
      - 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 arbitrary information about a particular schedule period,
such as the
      reason why a particular week has an unusual number of planned or actual
      direct task hours.
      - When you toggle from "Tree View" to "Flat View" and back, the
      currently selected task will be preserved.
   - A new charting and
reporting<http://www.processdash.com/enhancedChartExamples>extension
is available. This optional extension can display Gantt charts,
   burn-down charts, and several other useful views of earned values schedules.
   - 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 a web page or an Excel spreadsheet.
   - The "Tools > Preferences" dialog now provides 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.
   - Fixes for several bugs:
#3064050<http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3064050&group_id=9858&atid=109858>,
   #3064051<http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3064051&group_id=9858&atid=109858>,
   #3064053<http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3064053&group_id=9858&atid=109858>,
   #3064054<http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3064054&group_id=9858&atid=109858>,
   #3064057<http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3064057&group_id=9858&atid=109858>,
   #3064059<http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3064059&group_id=9858&atid=109858>,
   #3064060<http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3064060&group_id=9858&atid=109858>
   .

*
Upgrade Considerations*

   - Teams are encouraged to upgrade together. Some features may not work
   properly until all team members have upgraded, and exported their data at
   least once.
   - Teams using the built-in metrics collection framework will enjoy this
   functionality simply by upgrading. Teams that have defined their own custom
   metrics collection framework will need to refresh the
definition<http://www.tuma-solutions.com/metricsFrameworkEditor.html#upgrading>of
that framework.

*
Download*

For more information, or to download the Process Dashboard, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/



PSP(SM) is a service mark of Carnegie Mellon University. The open source
team that writes the Process Dashboard is not affiliated with Carnegie
Mellon University. Neither Carnegie Mellon University nor the Software
Engineering Institute have reviewed or endorsed the Process Dashboard.

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard 1.12.1 is Now Available

[<pro...@li...>]

Process Dashboard Version 1.12.1 has been released to fix a high-priority
defect.

Version 1.12 contained a bug that prevents some users from deleting defects
from the defect log. Longtime dashboard users are unaffected by this bug.
Individuals who began their use of the Process Dashboard by installing
version 1.12 are encouraged to upgrade.

To download version 1.12.1, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard 1.12 is Now Available

[<pro...@li...>]

The Process Dashboard development team is pleased to announce the
availability of version 1.12 of the Process Dashboard.  To download version
1.12, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/

Version 1.12 includes these significant new features:

   - Since version 1.7, the dashboard has included a team metrics collection
   framework called "Software Systems Development." To avoid the possibility of
   copyright violations, that metrics framework has used a different set of
   process phases than the TSP(SM). Beginning with version 1.12, Carnegie
   Mellon University has generously granted us permission to
distribute<http://www.processdash.com/pspTermsOfUse>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. *(Legal disclaimer: The open source team that writes the
   Process Dashboard  is not affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University.
   Carnegie Mellon University has neither reviewed nor endorsed the Process
   Dashboard or this metrics framework.)*
   - 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.
   - In the WBS Editor Team Member List, the column headers now display
   dates in a locale-sensitive manner for non-US teams.
   - 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.
   - 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.)
   - Several reporting enhancements:
   - 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.
      - Charts have been added to the PSP project plan summary forms to
      display time, defects, and PQI.
      - 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.
      - 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.
      - 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.
   - Fixes to several bugs, including:
      - 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.
      - 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.
      - 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.
   - 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.


Upgrade Considerations

   - Teams are encouraged to upgrade together. Some features may not work
   properly until all team members have upgraded, and exported their data at
   least once.
   - Teams using the built-in metrics collection framework will enjoy this
   functionality simply by upgrading. Teams that have defined their own custom
   metrics collection framework will need to refresh the
definition<http://www.tuma-solutions.com/metricsFrameworkEditor.html#upgrading>of
that framework.

Download

For more information, or to download the Process Dashboard, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/


PSP(SM) and TSP(SM) are service marks of Carnegie Mellon University. The
open source team that writes the Process Dashboard is not affiliated with
Carnegie Mellon University. Neither Carnegie Mellon University nor the
Software Engineering Institute have reviewed or endorsed the Process
Dashboard.

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard 1.11 is Now Available

[<pro...@li...>]

The Process Dashboard development team is pleased to announce the
availability of version 1.11 of the Process Dashboard.  To download version
1.11, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/

Version 1.11 includes these significant new features:

   - External URLs can now be attached to any component or task in the
   dashboard. Teams can have quick, one-click access to collaborative team
   websites, organizational defect/issue trackers, and other corporate intranet
   web pages that are relevant to the task at hand.
   - A Preferences dialog is now 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 toolbar button is 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.
   - When you create a team project, the dashboard prompts you for the
   directory where team data should be stored. Later in the project, if you
   discover that you need to move these files to a different location on the
   network, a tool is provided to relocate team data.
   - Significant enhancements have been made to the PSP(SM) 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, *PSP: 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 enter 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 Project Plan Summary forms are now tailorable in support of
      personal process improvement goals.
   - Significant changes have been made in support of the PSP training
   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
helper to match
      their grading preferences.
      - Error messages now appear on the Project Plan Summary form to warn
      engineers about common mistakes (e.g. forgetting to enter actual size,
      negative size values, etc)
      - It is now much easier for students to create the quality plan for
      their first PSP2 assignment.
      - 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.
   - 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 Code Collaborator <http://smartbear.com/> can take
   advantage of this new import feature to reduce double-entry of defect data.

Upgrade Considerations

   - This version of the dashboard changes the way data files are stored on
   Unix/Linux platforms.  After Linux/Unix users upgrade to this version of the
   dashboard, they should not downgrade to a previous version.
   - Teams are encouraged to upgrade together. Some features may not work
   properly until all team members have upgraded, and exported their data at
   least once.
   - Teams using the built-in metrics collection framework will enjoy this
   functionality simply by upgrading. Teams that have defined their own custom
   metrics collection framework will need to refresh the
definition<http://www.tuma-solutions.com/metricsFrameworkEditor.html#upgrading>of
that framework.

Download

For more information, or to download the Process Dashboard, visit:
http://www.processdash.com/


PSP(SM) is a service mark of Carnegie Mellon University. The open source
team that writes the Process Dashboard is not affiliated with Carnegie
Mellon University. Neither Carnegie Mellon University nor the Software
Engineering Institute have reviewed or endorsed the Process Dashboard.

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard 1.10 is now available

[<pro...@li...>]

The development team for the Software Process Dashboard Initiative is
pleased to announce the availability of version 1.10 of the Process
Dashboard.  To download version 1.10, visit:
http://processdash.sourceforge.net/

Version 1.10 includes these significant new features:

   - 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(SM) 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.

Upgrade Considerations

   - Teams are encouraged to upgrade together. Some features may not work
   properly until all team members have upgraded, and exported their data at
   least once.
   - Teams using the built-in metrics collection framework will enjoy this
   functionality simply by upgrading. Teams that have defined their own custom
   metrics collection framework will need to refresh the
definition<http://www.tuma-solutions.com/metricsFrameworkEditor.html#upgrading>of
that framework.

Download

For more information, or to download the Process Dashboard, visit:
http://processdash.sourceforge.net/

PSP(SM) is a service mark of Carnegie Mellon University. The open source
team that writes the Process Dashboard is not affiliated with Carnegie
Mellon University.

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard version 1.9 is now available

[<pro...@li...>]

The development team for the Software Process Dashboard Initiative is
pleased to announce the availability of version 1.9 of the Process
Dashboard.  To download version 1.9, visit:
http://processdash.sourceforge.net/

Version 1.9 includes these significant new features:

   - 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.

Upgrade Considerations

   - Teams are encouraged to upgrade together. Some features may not work
   properly until all team members have upgraded, and exported their data at
   least once.
   - Teams using the built-in metrics collection framework will enjoy
   this functionality simply by upgrading. Teams that have defined their own
   custom metrics collection framework will need to refresh the
   definition<http://www.tuma-solutions.com/metricsFrameworkEditor.html#upgrading>of
that framework.

Download

For more information, or to download the Process Dashboard, visit:
http://processdash.sourceforge.net/

PSP(SM) is a service mark of Carnegie Mellon University. The open source
team that writes the Process Dashboard is not affiliated with Carnegie
Mellon University.

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard version 1.8 is now available

[<pro...@li...>]

The development team for the Software Process Dashboard Initiative is
pleased to announce the availability of version 1.8 of the Process
Dashboard.  To download version 1.8, visit:
http://processdash.sourceforge.net/


In addition to new functionality, version 1.8 includes the fix for a
recently-discovered security vulnerability which was present in earlier
versions of the Process Dashboard. Users are strongly encouraged to upgrade.
For more information on this vulnerability, visit:
http://processdash.sourceforge.net/security_advisory.htm


Version 1.8 includes these significant new features:

   - Several enhancements to the Work Breakdown Structure Editor:
      - Individuals can now open the team Work Breakdown Structure
      directly from their personal dashboard, via a new option on the
script menu.
      (The Team Dashboard does not need to be running, and the
individual does not
      need a Team Dashboard shortcut, to use this feature.)
         - This can be configured to open the WBS either in
         read-only mode or editable mode. The default is to open the
WBS read-only,
         for viewing purposes. To grant team members the ability to
edit the WBS,
         open the Team Project Parameters and Settings page for the
project, and
         check the appropriate box.
         - If individuals open the WBS using this approach, add new
         tasks, and save the changes, the new tasks will appear in
their dashboard
         immediately (a sync occurs automatically).
      - If an individual needs to perform a "Synchronize to WBS"
      operation, they will receive an alert shortly after starting the
dashboard.
      When changes to the WBS are saved, an automatic "Synchronize to WBS"
      operation will take place in the Team Dashboard immediately.
      - If another individual has the Work Breakdown Structure locked
      for editing when you attempt to open it, the dialog that appears will now
      tell you the name of that other individual.
      - The Work Breakdown Structure Editor now includes an expand all
      button on the editing toolbar.
      - When the Work Breakdown Structure editor is opened, tasks will
      initially be expanded and collapsed as they were the previous
time the WBS
      was viewed.
      - Backups of the team Work Breakdown Structure are now created
      each time the WBS is saved, and kept for 30 days. This makes it
possible to
      recover from catastrophic edits that are made to the WBS accidentally.
      - In the past, if you opened the WBS for editing, then lost and
      regained network connectivity, your lock on the WBS could be
silently lost.
      This would open the door for you and another individual to edit the WBS
      simultaneously, and possibly overwrite each other's work. This
problem has
      been resolved.
      - If you don't have permission to modify the files for the WBS,
      a warning will be displayed immediately when you open the Work Breakdown
      Structure Editor. Previously, the editor would open normally,
and you would
      only see an error when you attempted to save changes.
      - Bugfix: in the Work Breakdown Structure Editor,
      top-down-bottom-up errors would sometimes occur if the value in the Time
      column was only changed by a small amount. This error has been corrected.
   - Several enhancements to earned value support:
      - Drag-and-drop can be used to reorder tasks in the Flat View of
      an earned value schedule.
      - Forecast dates are calculated for every task in the EV
      schedule.
      - A new "Replan" column has been added to the earned value task
      list. This column displays the planned dates that would result
if you were
      to "replan from today." This column can be a useful tool for projecting
      completion dates in the face of schedule slips - particularly
early in the
      project, when the forecast dates are too volatile to be trusted.
      - 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. At the team level, this generalizes
the existing
      "Individual Chart" feature, making it easy to view earned value
charts and
      statistics for any hierarchical subset of the project.
      - 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.
      - When you apply a label filter to the team project plan, that
      filter will affect all parts of the earned value report and the
week report.
      - Now, the weekly earned value report *always* has a "Next"
      hyperlink. You can move as far into the future as you like, without being
      constrained by the preexisting schedule boundaries.
      - The earned value report now includes clickable column headings
      for sorting data. Also, the "Weekly View" link has been moved from the
      bottom of the page to the top of the page.
      - If you turn of the "Assigned To" column on an EV report, it
      will also turn of the names of individuals in the task dependency status
      details. The resulting report should not indicate the name of any real
      person, making it safer to share with external stakeholders.
      - Whenever the status information for a task dependency is
      displayed, it will now display the dependent task's forecast
completion date
      instead of the planned date. (If the forecast date is unavailable, the
      planned date will be used as a fallback.)
      - When the Task & Schedule window is opened, tasks will
      initially be expanded and collapsed as they were the previous time the
      schedule was viewed.
   - Several enhancements to team project support:
      - It is now possible to view the rolled up time log for team and
      master projects. Time log entries from all individuals are consolidated
      anonymously into a single list, and displayed in a user
interface similar to
      the Time Log Editor. Time log entries can be analyzed by WBS
component, and
      filtered by date.
      - For convenience, many of the buttons on the Team Tools and
      Settings page have been replicated in the script button's drop-down menu.
      - It is now simpler for a user to add tasks to a team project
      within the Hierarchy Editor. A new task can be added with a single step
      (rather than adding a subtask then adding a phase underneath).
In addition,
      the Common Team Workflows defined by the team will appear as entries
      underneath the "Add Templates" menu in the Hierarchy Editor.
      - Many teams do not use the full list of phases provided by
      their team metrics collection framework, and the extra/unused
phases clutter
      their team project plan summaries and charts. The 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.
(This feature is
      available on the Project Parameters and Settings page)
      - Overzealous internationalization logic in the dashboard was
      preventing the proper operation of team functionality for users speaking
      Spanish, Japanese, or Chinese.
   - A new "Quick Launcher" tool is provided for quickly opening a
   dashboard instance without making a shortcut first. This launcher can open
   any arbitrary pspdata or teaminstance directory you specify, as well as any
   backup file (such as the ZIP files automatically exported by individuals).
   The launcher can even find dashboard data in ZIP files inside another ZIP
   files.
      - For access to this new tool, run the installer, select the
      "Tools for Team Leaders" option, and create shortcuts.
      - To use the launcher, simply drag and drop a directory, ZIP
      file, or PDBK file (see below) onto the Quick Launcher icon.
Alternatively,
      you can start the Quick Launcher application by clicking on the
icon, then
      drag and drop files onto the Quick Launcher window.
   - 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 of their choosing.
   The backup can be saved either in ZIP format, or Process Dashboard Backup
   (PDBK) format. (The latter format is provided as a convenience for
   organizations that have difficulty emailing ZIP files.) The resulting files
   can be opened in the Quick Launcher from any computer, at any point in the
   future, with or without network access, to view exactly what that dashboard
   instance looked like at the moment the backup was made. This new option
   provides several powerful uses:
      - Individuals can save a snapshot of their personal Process
      Dashboard instance, and send it to a team leader, coach, or
instructor for
      mentoring or other support.
      - Team leaders can save a snapshot of their Team Dashboard
      instance, and send it to a launch coach for mentoring / support.
The coach
      can open the resulting file with the Quick Launcher, see their team plan,
      open their WBS, and even edit the WBS - all without modifying the "real
      plan," and without needing access to the shared network
directory where team
      data is stored.
      - Team leaders can save snapshots of their *entire* Team
      Dashboard instance on a periodic basis. Unlike the current plan summary
      snapshots, these data backups capture the complete state of the
team plan at
      an instant in time, with full interactivity. This makes it
possible to open
      a historical version of the team dashboard, and see exactly what the team
      plan looked like at some time in the past.
      - A team leader can save a backup of their team data directory,
      then open that backup to perform limited "what-if" analyses, without
      altering the real team plan.
   - Additional enhancements:
      - A new visual indicator has been added to the main Process
      Dashboard toolbar, displaying the percent spent for the current
task. This
      makes it simple for individuals to notice that they are
overrunning the cost
      estimate for a given task.
      - For convenience, the dashboard's LOC accounting tool has been
      added to the Tools menu.
      - When a user manually enters interrupt time in their time log,
      the delta time is now adjusted accordingly.
      - It is now possible to select time log entries in the personal
      Time Log Editor or team Time Log Viewer, and copy these to the
clipboard for
      analysis in another program like Excel.
      - The PROBE Wizard is now displayed in a larger, resizable
      window to address width problems with the "Historical Data"
page. Also, when
      the user has mismatched size and time estimates, the final page of the
      wizard now includes a hyperlink allowing them to accept those
estimates and
      quit anyway.
      - A bug in the PSP(SM) for Engineers template was preventing
      students from adding phases to their Interim Report and Final
Report tasks.
      This bug has been corrected.
      - The injection phase of a fix defect is now initialized by
      default to the removal phase of the causative defect.
      - Bugfix: some users on Windows Vista were receiving an error
      when starting the dashboard, complaining that the time log file
could not be
      read. This error has been corrected.

Upgrade Considerations

   - Teams are encouraged to upgrade together. Some features may not work
   properly until all team members have upgraded, and exported their data at
   least once.
   - Teams using the built-in metrics collection framework will enjoy
   this functionality simply by upgrading. Teams that have defined their own
   custom metrics collection framework will need to refresh the
   definition<http://www.tuma-solutions.com/metricsFrameworkEditor.html#upgrading>of
that framework.

Download

For more information, or to download the Process Dashboard, visit:
http://processdash.sourceforge.net/


PSP(SM) is a service mark of Carnegie Mellon University. The open source
team that writes the Process Dashboard is not affiliated with Carnegie
Mellon University.

[Processdash-announce] Process Dashboard 1.7-RC1 is now available

[<pro...@li...>]

The development team for the Software Process Dashboard Initiative is
pleased to announce the availability of version 1.7-RC1 of the Process
Dashboard!  Version 1.7-RC1 includes these significant new features:

   - 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 valuefunctionality:
      - 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 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.


This version of the dashboard is a release candidate:

   - Multilingual users are invited to create translations using the new
   Localization Tool, and send them to the Process Dashboard development team
   for inclusion in the final release.
   - Please report defects to the Process Dashboard development team for
   attention before the final release.


For more information, or to download the Process Dashboard, visit:
http://processdash.sourceforge.net/

[Processdash-announce] Version 1.6 is now available

[<pro...@li...>]

The  development  team for  the  Software Process  Dashboard
Initiative  is  pleased  to  announce  the  availability  of
version 1.6 of the  Process Dashboard!  Version 1.6 includes
these significant new features:

* 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(SM)  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.

To download the new  version of the Process Dashboard, visit
our website:
    http://processdash.sourceforge.net

------------------------------------------------------------

PSP(SM)  is a  registered  service mark  of Carnegie  Mellon
University.  The  Process Dashboard development  team is not
affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University.

[Processdash-announce] Version 1.5 is now available

[<pro...@li...>]

The  development  team for  the  Software Process  Dashboard
Initiative  is  pleased  to  announce  the  availability  of
version 1.5 of the  Process Dashboard!  Version 1.5 includes
these significant new features:

* The  dashboard  is now  compatible  with  version 1.4  and
  higher   of  the   Java  Runtime   Environment   from  Sun
  Microsystems.

* 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.

To download the new  version of the Process Dashboard, visit
our website:
    http://processdash.sourceforge.net

------------------------------------------------------------

The  Software Process  Dashboard Initiative  always welcomes
individuals  who would  like  to contribute!   If you  enjoy
writing technical documentation or  java code, and you would
like  to help  advance  the cause  of  PSP(SM) and  TSP(SM),
please contact the development team at:
    pro...@li...

------------------------------------------------------------

A new  mailing list is  now available for  Process Dashboard
"power users." Subscribe to this list if you would like to:
    * Receive  announcements  about  early-release
      versions of the dashboard
    * Provide user feedback to steer new dashboard
      features
    * Participate  in  discussions about  advanced
      dashboard usage
To subscribe to the "power users" mailing list, visit
http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/processdash-power-users

------------------------------------------------------------

PSP(SM) and TSP(SM) are registered service marks of Carnegie
Mellon University.

[Processdash-announce] Version 1.4.1 is now available

[<pro...@li...>]

The  development  team for  the  Software Process  Dashboard
Initiative  is  pleased  to  announce  the  availability  of
version 1.4.1 of the Process Dashboard!

We have  been working with Addison-Wesley  (the publisher of
"A Discipline for  Software Engineering"), and have obtained
permission to distribute  the dashboard once again.  Version
1.4.1   contains   new   copyright  notices   requested   by
Addison-Wesley.

To download version 1.4.1, visit:
        http://processdash.sourceforge.net/

Thank you for  your patience and your support  over the last
month.

- Process Dashboard Development Team