GreenHopper 5.8 Release Notes
12th October 2011
The Atlassian team is proud to bring you the GreenHopper 5.8 release.
In GreenHopper 5.8 the Rapid Board graduates from Labs. The Rapid Board is an exciting new way to use GreenHopper. Most importantly the Rapid Board includes support for multiple JIRA projects, which alone satisfies a whopping 255 votes — the biggest feature request in GreenHopper's history!
What are people saying about the Rapid Board?
We’re using the Rapid Board for a few things — our project governance process and our support/helpdesk functions. Both of these are cross JIRA project functions, so required the Rapid Board features. Prior to this, we managed it by using a variety of filters and physical cards on walls. The Rapid Board has allowed us to streamline the entire process, increase visibility with offsite teams and easily track and report on project metrics.
Dale Harrison - Morningstar
The introduction of the new Rapid Board features significantly improves the day to day user experience for all users, particularly those working in large multi-team, multi-product development environments. The ability to create one view across multiple projects is a huge benefit for Project Managers, Architects, Technical Writers, DBA’s and especially team members involved in large-scale development projects.
Nicholas Hughes - SunGard
It's a super feature and has changed how we do things already. The swimlanes is a phenomenal feature and the fact that you can view the issue on clicking on the right hand side is a super productivity booster.
We used to have epics and stories like GH and now plan to move even that to features and stories by viewing them using swimlanes.
Also for my own learning. I have been using agile/scrum for years but never explored kanban. The fact that the Rapid Board supports kanban forced to me learn that and I realized that my sustenance and some solution projects really are better off using kanban, rather that’s what we practically end up using. So that’s a great side effect for our org :)
Jaskaran Singh - Guavus
We recently added Kanban to our agile approaches and the Rapid Board has become the tool of choice for that development cycle.
Kevin Diamond - HauteLook
Upgrading to GreenHopper 5.8 is free for all customers with an active GreenHopper license.
Highlights of this release:
Thank you for your feedback:
Over 20 new features and improvements implemented
Over 300 votes fulfilled
Your votes and issues help us keep improving our products, and are greatly appreciated.
Please keep logging your votes and issues. They help us decide what needs doing!
Upgrading to GreenHopper 5.8
GreenHopper 5.8 requires an administrator to restart and reindex JIRA after the upgrade.
You can upgrade GreenHopper via the JIRA Plugin Manager. Before upgrading, please read the GreenHopper 5.8 Upgrade Notes.
Highlights of GreenHopper 5.8
Support for multiple JIRA projects on the Rapid Board
Teams can now view and transition issues from multiple JIRA projects on the one board, the Rapid Board. On the Rapid Board we have removed the old concepts of Project and Context and introduced a Rapid View. The Rapid View is based upon JQL allowing teams to select only those issues that matter to them.
For instance, a maintenance team may have a Rapid View with JQL that selects only issues of type "Bug" from three JIRA projects:
project IN ("Angry Nerds", Bamboo, Confluence) AND issuetype = Bug
The team can then see bugs from all three projects
Global Rank
Ranking in GreenHopper is now global, enabling teams to rank issues from many JIRA projects. Customers with lage instances will see significant performance improvements with the upgrade to GreenHopper 5.8 as ranking no longer requires a reindex of JIRA, providing continuous ranking activity without interruption.
Following the same maintenance team as above the JQL for this Rapid View would now become:
project IN ("Angry Nerds", "Fourwalls", "Pairon") AND issuetype = Bug ORDER BY Global Rank ASC
Multiple Global Rank fields are supported should you wish to have backlogs prioritised by different groups. For example one customer has three ranks - support rank, customer rank and product owner rank - where the product owner rank is an amalgamation of the other two ranks including their own priorities.
Kanban Improvements
Over the past six months the Rapid Board has been Kanban-centric. In GreenHopper 5.8, the Rapid Board includes a few nice new features for Kanban teams, including:
- Swimlanes
- Control Chart
- A Kanban Preset allows teams to get started quickly
The Future of JIRA Agile details how we will extend the Rapid Board over the coming months to support Scrum teams.
Other Enhancements and Fixes
GreenHopper 5.8 also introduces:
- Permanent URLs on the Rapid Board for 'what you see is what they get' when IM-ing or Emailing a link to a Rapid View.
- Cards contain the avatar of the Assignee, as well as a count of the number of days in column to visualise issues with possible impediments.
- Keyboard navigation and shortcuts on the Rapid Board provide quick triaging and prioritisation of stories and bugs in the backlog.
The issues for GreenHopper 5.8 are shown below. To view the list in JIRA, please see here.