Target Process is a tool created by Target Process Inc. to manage agile process. They can support Scrum, Extreme Programming, Lean and others. The tool have a good set of features and some nice ideas to speed up the addition of data for your project. They also provide a Eclipse and Visual Studio add-in so each developer can see their to-do list right on the IDE. If you like to try it for yourself there’s a 30 day free trial available.
Starting
One cool idea from Target Process, is that they create some activity flows, so you can quickly navigate through the features that you need most, like of instance, create a new project. You can create a project, create releases associated to that project and features to that releases, stories and so on. So you can build your initial structure fast and start working. The “Features” works like an Epic or Theme for your stories and if don’t care for that it can be totally skipped. If you’d like to use it’s possible to determine an estimation and priority for the features but it really doesn’t make much sense to me. I’d prefer to see something simpler like tags for the stories. We talk about estimating feature so, of course we can estimate stories also. That’s the first problem i think the tool have, it’s only possible to estimate using time units, ideal or not. That’s no mentions to story points at all, this miss, pushes Target Process to field of time tracking tools, which is not a good thing. Other issue that’s recurrent on our reviews is the prioritization and I’m glad to say that’s Target Process solves it nicely, you can define a Bussiness value to each story but you are not stuck with that prioritize a nice drag-and-drop feature is available for that, it could be little bit more integrated with the backlog view but is nice anyway.
Running a Sprint
Target Process is suposed to work with different agile models, so they use the term iteration instead of sprint. On Plan Iteration tab we can create our sprints, define start and end date, etc. After that we assign our stories and go on. On the Taskboard there’s an awkward choice, there’s only two columns available Open and Done, where’s the WIP ? It’s on another tab Kanban Board, I really don’t understand why they went that way, but for it’s no good at all.
There’s also a lot of additional features like Impediments, Bug control, Test cases and a lot of reports including Burndown charts. Target Process can integrate with vast number tools like of issue tracking tools, code repositories and more.
Conclusion
It’s hard to say what I think about Target Process, they had good ideas, like the shortcut flows, but really bad ones like the Kanban Board. Overall the tool is ok but not very intuitive, could be more polished on the user experience, and of course the common problem of too much focus on time tracking hurts a lot.ScdrS