Product roadmap Agresso TM

As I have mentioned before we are going to start a new sprint and begin on a new version of the portal. In this post I will mention a bit more detail on the next sprint and describe what we think we will do the rest of the year.

4.6 sprint 1

This sprint that will start tomorrow and end 21st of October will focus on one main feature, customizable start pages.

So what is a this, it is a dashboard type of page that you see on live.com, igoogle etc. It’s a page where you either allow individuals or Admins to put mini applications on a start page. So how does this work and why should you care. Since Agresso HRM TM right now supports learning and employee data processes with HR as a customer you might want to display information for your favorite ERP system ABW or any other system in the portal since all your users have access to this portal but maybe not to other systems.

By implementing this you will actually be able to display data from other systems, display reports on the start page with you crucial KPI’s for this year or you can simply have a rss roller if you publish news via rss that everyone that uses the Agresso TM portal should be aware of.

So what is a dashboard and how does it look:

Each start page for a role is a dashboard in this dashboard is template driven and you can select different templates, eg.  a three column layout like above or a one column full page template. These templates is really simple for us to make custom for you as a customer. A dashboard really only contains one or "panels” to start with. In a panel a user with proper permissions can then put gadgets in the panels. The portal will support one dashboard per role for Administrators to configure, and if enabled each user can customize his own start page.

Gadgets

So what is a gadget, a gadget is a small application that can give you information in a relatively small space, we will provide functionality for a gadget catalog where we and third party vendors can upload new gadgets. We will provide every thing you can see now on the start pages as gadgets, the shortcuts, system information, news etc from us. In addition we will also develop a chart gadget where you use your flexible fields to do averages etc on KPI’s. For us and report gadget so you can have your custom reports on the start page.

So what’s in it for a gadget developer, first of all as a gadget developer you will get information on who is logged in. you will also have access to our services for making queries about organizations and that particular user. In other you will get world class employee and organization information.

We will support in the final version for 4.6 also the possibility to host your gadgets within Agresso TM in addition to hosting your self on your server. So it will be fully possible to have

• a gadget on i.e the recruiting site that displays the current available jobs in the portal.
• a gadget displaying the task list from ABW
• a weather gadget from google
• a Chart displaying the average number of sick days per employee
• a Chart gadget displaying the staff turn around for one particular organization (the logged on user)

All this can be developed or configured in the portal and driven from our security model if you use our services, or roll your own for your database.

We have decided that we will support Gadget API that open social builds upon and is supported by many other applications.

http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs/dev_guide.html is the specification for gadgets we are going to implement.  The reason for choosing an existing api is that we don't want to invent the wheel again and to make it easier for third parties to understand and engage them in gadget development.

 

Product roadmap 2009-2010 4.6

We will start to release previews that you can use on QA and or production, but you must be aware of that we will add and or change functionality until we are feature complete on 4.6.

Week starting oct 26 first customer preview of 4.6 will be available

• Dashboard and some gadgets

Week starting nov 30 second customer preview

• More gadgets
• Possibility to host your gadget code in Agresso TM

Week starting January 11th Feature complete 4.6

• A more visual organization manager

These are estimated dates and not promises.

Released 4.5.3941

Today we are releasing the final version of 4.5 from now on there will be no new functionality but continue our work towards greater quality. New in these release notes are also that we display build numbers and we will continue to improve the process of build numbers. But for now if there is a bug found 4.5 it might not exist in 4.4 we will figure our a way to handle the version number between major versions but for now all notes are in one.

Also for you that are not familiar with 4.5 we have some exciting news about functionality in this version. We will blog about them in detail in the future and last posts have actually been about 4.5 functionality.

The release notes are available on the agresso extranet

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Main features in 4.5

Flexible fields

It is now possible to add fields to User and organization information easy in the UX under system administration. So its now possible with out any consultancy to add extra info about users that you want to keep in the portal.

Layout editor

Together with flexible fields we also introduced a layout editor for user and org information. Now you can yourself completely design the look and feel of “my information” page etc

• Layout per role
• Smart rendering functionality, or decide your self if you want radio buttons, select boxes etc
• Valid values
• Different dates
• basic data types (numbers, strings etc)
• Logging of changes

New integration service

We also provide you with a completely rewritten integration service where you can both read and write user and organization information that is based on the current access you have. This is the first step for us towards more SOA enabled functionality in the portal. There will be more blog post about this both the strategy and technical

Main features of the services

• WCF or WSDL access
• Regular HRM portal accounts to access the service, and that accounts restrictions apply in the service as well
• Search language
• Find our what has changed sincle last

Handling sessions with only one participant

In my next blog abut handling health checks in the portal part 2 I will go in more detail about the new feature of letting a employee or manager set up individual visits to i.e a doctor and handle that in the portal.

Tracking of correct answers scorm

If you are using scorm and 4.5 there is now a possibility to send mails to employees or i.e manager when they complete a scorm course telling them what questions went wrong etc. It also enables you as a customer to purchase reports to benchmark complete courses.  What question is the most difficult etc etc. This could help you to decide how you build future courses.

Sitetext editor

You can now edit texts in the portal with an editor, we also introduced a new feature so you can download the texts in excel and import that file back to the portal. We are getting closer and closer to enable you to all you want in the portal.

.Net 3.5

We are now shipping the the portal in .net 3.5 and we support SQL server 2008 and 2005.

There is more minor tweaks mostly config things i.e more list to edit,

Agresso HRM is continuing to invest in Quality software

We are still focusing on quality software here on HRM and apart form starting to make some backend changes to our build and check in process we have committed our selves to reach a bug count of 0 before we start up new development. We are of course aware that there may still be bugs but we really want our customer and our selves to get a new clean start with 4.5. On top of this commitment of fixing all open bugs we recruited a senior software tester that will join us at office on September 7. Not only will she be responsible for improving our test she will also help and manage the testing process from story cards to test cases. We are looking forward with great anticipation on the influence she will have on us here at development.

 

First priority for our new tester

1. Improve our ability to avoid regression bugs
2. Functionality testing
3. Usability testing

 

The hunt for quality

So how is the journey towards 0 bugs going, are we ever going go build features again you might wonder. If I may say so its going pretty darn well. And one reason for knowing this is that we have consolidated all customer bugs in to one list and we only work from this list. Here is a couple of quality KPI for you.

 

As you can se we have 23 open bugs at the moment. Don’t be alarmed by the deleted bug count. A bug can be deleted for a couple of reasons.

• Its already fixed in a later version
• Its a duplicate
• Its not reproducible for us
• Its NOT a bug, its  a feature ;) yeah I know but its true its now common but they do exist.

Also an interesting measurement is what kind of bugs are we finding and getting reports on .

We have 3 mainly three categories of bugs

Blocking – That is a bug so severe that there is no way around it, all or most customers would be affected by it because its a central piece of functionality.

Critical - That is a bug that is severe but there is a way around it, all or most customers would be affected by it because its a central piece of functionality.

High – All other bugs

The below chart illustrates both progress and the type of bugs: 

As you can see our fixrate is almost twice as high as the found rate, So given that we have a sustainable pace on both fixing and finding bugs it looks like we will be done with all bugs in about three weeks time  (26 currently open, 18 new bugs per week and we fix around 40 a week).