Pre-GDC: Hansoft To Launch Version 5.3 At GDC

Swedish tools developer Hansoft will launch the newest version of its eponymous project management and QA software next week during the Game Developers Conference, the company announced. Most prominently, the upcoming Hansoft 5.3 will add an asset pipeline tool, something the company says its clients have been waiting for, describing "in-depth discussions with studios" on optimizing asset pipeline management. "Many teams are also experiencing that it's hard to combine an agile process like scrum with the linear nature of asset creation," says Hansoft development director Hans Andersson. "This became a large and very exciting research project on our side." In Hansoft 5.3, the company says art pipelines and sign-off workflows can be created in parallel. The update also adds a tool for editing and applying workflows for art sign-off, quality iterations, user story testing and other items. A new report generator allows users to create and share reports among teams with Hansoft's visual query builder, new query language and grouping functionality. The company also says it's upgraded the agile and QA feature sets for "smoother" usage, and implemented performance enhancements that reduce Hansoft server synchronization time. "Every day we get large amounts of great feedback from clients that we use to continuously make improvements of Hansoft," says Andersson. "[The new report generator] was originally based on feedback from QA managers that wanted the reporting in the bug database part of Hansoft to be more powerful."