Hansoft Supports Kanban, Multiple Workflows, With Latest Release

Pipeline management tools developer Hansoft has released the latest version of its eponymous solution, Hansoft 6.1, adding support for the Kanban development technique and the ability to handle multiple parallel workflows. "Kanban is hot in the development community right now and we are proud to introduce, not only the most extensive and easy to use support for Kanban, but also a unique support for Kanbans with multiple swimlanes of workflow," says Hansoft chief development officer Hans Andersson. Andersson says that the company worked with various development clients to refine the tool in practice, and promises that Lean and Kanban development methods can be combined with Scrum and Gantt approaches within the same project. The company says Hansoft 6.1 has also improved release and sprint burndowns by offering graphical metrics for milestones and "ideal" days. It also says it's extended XML data importing and exporting, all with the aim of increasing visibility on a project's process and easing long-term planning. Among the other new features in Hansoft 6.1 is further support for spreadsheet functionality, whereby all information from the tool can be exported to the Excle format. The XML data import-export also includes support for custom columns so that developers have more than one option for migration from other tools. In the project backlog, developers can convert ideal days to task schedule duration days, among other features aimed at making it easier to correspond a view of the pipeline with a schedule of relevant milestones. Hansoft has also aimed to incorporate further functionalities that enable cross-project collaboration: status of individual items can be shown via links to tasks. Hansoft says it's also implemented performance enhancements, promising "virtually no" CPU or context-switching when idle, and a higher frame rate for rendering the wall view and displaying cards on-screen. Finally, some house-keeping: projects on the main application toolbar have been rearranged to streamline administration, and further options for views and descriptions have been added so that developers can customize and organize. Bug IDs are now included in activity details, and alphabetic sorting has been added to the QA drop-down menus, for example.