Planning

Project planning has seen new features such as the new Formal Project Template, project schedule as a Gantt chart, finer grain time tracking, and enhancements in Scrum boards.

Formal Project Template

Support for more traditional project planning capabilities has been added as the new Formal Project Template. This project template can be configured to tailor the needs of agile teams. In this process, you can track the project in sequential phases—Requirements, Design, Implementation, and Testing. Team members complete each phase by a certain deadline and then move on to the next phase. Phase planning is scheduled in such a way that the project is ready by the delivery date.

The Formal Project Template is ready to use and has all the necessary work items such as Defect, Task, Project Change Request, Plan Item, Risk, Risk Action, Issue, and Milestone. The Plan View has an additional Resources tab that allows you to allocate the resources to the plan. You can create Risk work items that allow you to identify the risks and mitigate them via risk action work items. You can use the Gantt chart in the Plan view to see a graphical representation of the plan schedule, including work item durations and dependencies. An example Release Plan for a project with Formal Project Template is shown in the next screenshot:

Time Tracking

When you create a work item for a project following the Formal Template Project, you will see another tab added. Time Tracking tab allows you to enter the time spent on specific sub-phases. For example, for the Requirements phase, you could enter the time for Coding, Review, Documentation, and Testing sub-phases as shown here:

Scrum boards

Task boards have been redesigned with a couple of key usability goals in mind. First, task boards are made to look a lot closer to what you see on a Scrum whiteboard with column headings for each item, and tasks that look like sticky notes with proper drag handles. The task organization has been simplified with the layout a lot more flexible and the work item state groups can now be configured. Another cool feature is that you can now configure the kinds of overview bars to show for users by editing the view, or you can click on the bar to toggle between them.

Along with the before mentioned features, you have many more exciting features to explore in the new version of Rational Team Concert.