Delivery Plans Public Preview Update

Dan Hellem

We announced the new Delivery Plans experience in the sprint 178 update on November 12th. Since then we have been getting lots of great feedback from our customers and folks across the community. Our team has been hard at work addressing feedback, fixing bugs, improving performance, and even adding new features. We thought it was a good time to highlight some of these improvements.

Rollup

When dealing with higher level work items like Epics or Features, in order to see the full story, you need to see the progress of the underlying child work items. For example, if you want to know how an Epic is progressing, you need to know the status of its features and the stories and bugs tied to those features.

Image rollup

This is what rollup provides. It gives you the full picture of the underlying work directly on the cards in your delivery plan. To enable this feature, go to your plan settings, then fields, and select “show child rollup data”.

Card cleanup & performance

Over the last several weeks the team has spent a lot of time addressing the feedback around performance and refining the card display. You should notice significant improvements with card rendering, resizing, and re-ordering. There have also been several adjustments on the display of the cards themselves. Condensing fields where we can and also hiding fields depending on the zoom level.

Card cleanup and performance will be ongoing over the next several weeks. Let us know if you have any feedback for us to consider.

Collapsed card view

Cards can take up a lot of vertical space when you add several fields. This makes it hard to see more than a few cards on the screen at a time, even when you fully zoom out. To rectify this, we created a collapsed card view. When clicked, it will hide all of the fields from the cards and only display the work item type icon and title. Click it again and all your fields come back.

Image collapsed cards

We like to refer to this as the “leadership” view by showing the progress of items without all the detail. This is a great way to better visualize multiple backlog levels and teams together in a more condensed display.

Coming soon

There are two more outstanding items we need to complete. Dependency tracking and the support of more than ten teams on a plan.

For dependency tracking, this work is currently on-going and we hope to have some kind of preview available before the end of 2020. We are very excited for this feature and we can’t wait for it to get into the hands of our customers.

Work to support more than ten teams is something we plan to address in early 2021. Unfortunately the problem is complicated when pulling in many teams with large backlogs. We decided to keep the ten team limit in place for now. Once Delivery Plans is feature complete, we can start figuring out the best way to optimize the experience for supporting more than ten team backlogs on a plan.

Feedback

Many of you have provided some great feedback that has helped us discover bugs and improve the experience. We can’t thank you enough and keep the feedback coming.