A new version of Meliora Testlab – Mystery Soda – has been released. This release enhances numerous primary features related to the task management features introduced in the previous release. Please read more about these new features below.
Sprint burn up charts
In the task board’s sprint planning view, a set of graphs has been introduced to make the tracking of the sprint’s progress easier. You can choose from six different graphs one that fits your use best:
- Burn Up charts calculated from the number of tasks or combined effort,
- Burn Down charts calculated from the number of tasks or combined effort or
- the number of tasks or combined effort per column in each day for sprint duration.
The charts are automatically refreshed periodically and should offer you a real-time view of the progress of your sprint.
Better epics
An epic is a significant body of work broken down into user stories or other types of requirements. In this release, when searching for assets in tasks view, the stories and requirements are grouped by epic. The epic for requirements is automatically determined from the requirement tree by looking for the closest parent epic for each requirement.
Also, in the tasks view, checking the “Show epic” checkbox (or holding down shift-key) shows an overlay of the epic the tasks belong to.
Moving tasks by epic
In this release, you can easily move all tasks of a single epic at the same time. To do this, hold down the shift-key – which will show you which epics the tasks belong to (see “Better epics” above) – and drag a task from a backlog. You will see that by doing this, you will grab all tasks belonging to the same epic from which you made the initial drag. If you drop the tasks to the same backlog, the tasks of the epic will be moved successively to the drop position. Similarly, if you drop the tasks to another backlog, the tasks will be moved to the other backlog to the drop position.
By using the shift key, handling tasks of a particular epic is much easier!
Other enhancements to tasks
In addition to the above:
- A “Take this”-button is shown for each unassigned task on the task board. You can assign the task to yourself with a single click on this button.
- When tasks are shown on the board, the estimated effort is always visible.
- In backlogs, the tasks will always show the avatar of the current assignee.
- In the Test runs view, a button has been added to easily add a new task coupled to the chosen test run.
- An indicator has been added to the top of the task board column to show the number of tasks currently in the column. The indicator is red if the number of tasks in the column exceeds the maximum number of tasks specified for the column.
- Files can be attached to the tasks.
- For requirements and issues, after the form used to edit the details of the asset, the coupled and linked tasks are shown in a dedicated taskbar. This taskbar also has a button to easily add a new task coupled to the current asset.
Important note about milestones’ date periods
Note: In this release, the logic of how the milestones and sprints in the milestones view are presented changes. Milestones are now always ordered in the most-recent first order by their deadline. Milestones without a deadline are sorted by their title. Also, for a sprint, the start date must be entered for the system to be able to calculate the actual length of the sprint.
Thanking you for all your feedback,
Meliora team
Between the early 1990s and 2018, if you happened to be thirsty and wandering in Capitol Hill, Seattle, you might’ve bumped into a soda machine in front of Broadway Locksmith. You had an option of choosing from “? mystery ?” drinks and when doing so, the machine would often dispense rare out-of-circulation cans and cans that have not been available in the US.
Nobody knows who operated the machine. In 2018 it seems that the machine had enough and took a vacation. A note was found where the machine used to be which read “Went for a walk”.
(Source: Atlas Obscura, Wikipedia, Picture by Another Believer from Wikipedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)