We are thrilled to announce that YouTrack 7.0, code-named Inception, is now available to use as part of the EAP (Early Access Program).
Try YouTrack 7.0 EAP on our Sandbox instance, or move your newly registered InCloud instance to v7.0. Detailed instructions are provided at the end of this post.
So, what’s inside?
Agile Board Updates
We have thoroughly investigated the requests we received from our users, and implemented a lot of cool and useful features to do with the Agile Board.
The most important change is that Sprints are no longer treated as Fix version. With this new concept, you explicitly add cards to the board, and the connection between the issue and the board is no longer controlled by any custom field. If you prefer to keep the usual workflow, you can still set up synchronization between Sprints and Versions.
We’ve also moved on to a cleaner, smoother and more user-friendly look-and-feel. With the improved UI, it becomes easier to navigate the board and manage issues both on the board and in the backlog.
When it comes to Scrum, it is important to determine a Sprint goal so the whole team is focused on the same objective. It is now possible to define a Sprint goal in YouTrack. You can also automatically add new issues created in projects to the current sprint. This means that every time a new issue is created in any project included in the board, it will appear in the current sprint.
Working with issues
Drafts
Issue drafts are now available on Agile Board. You can create drafts on a board in different columns and swimlanes, and YouTrack will save your draft even if you accidentally close the issue or close your browser. You can always find the full list of drafts on the full issue screen, even if they were created on the board.
Creating and editing issues
We’ve heard your wishes concerning issue layout on creating or editing screens, and we made it look more similar to the full issue screen. Now when you create or edit an issue on a board, more details are visible to you: you can edit some custom fields, edit issue visibility, and add an estimation value if time tracking is enabled in your project.
Backlog Management
Working with the product backlog is sometimes challenging. It may not always be easy to sort a list of random issues in an organized format or to modify them. So, we’ve simplified your work and made the backlog more similar to the full-features issue list, with filtering capability available.
You can now edit issues’ custom fields and details, filter issues, add subtasks, and use shortcuts and commands right in the backlog.
We are also working on a search box and a tree view inside the backlog. These will help you determine the viability of the product’s backlog and manage it better.
Live Updates
Teams that work on a board together usually experience difficulties with tracking updates, as users have to refresh the page every time to see the changes made on the board. To fix this, YouTrack 7.0 supports real-time updates of Agile boards. Move issues around freely, edit or modify them, and never waste your time on refreshing the page!
Gantt Chart
This is one of the most wanted features in the new version. Gantt charts are very important for those who care about planning, as they allow you to plan project tasks on a timeline, follow the progress and show where your project will likely be at a certain point in time. In YouTrack, Gantt chart creates a plan for a set of tasks to be accomplished over time. There are several options to set up the Gantt chart based on your specific requirements; you can add several projects into one chart, determine the query, and define parent and subtasks tree depth.
To create a report, YouTrack gets the estimation, spent time and dependency links that are pre-filled in the issues by users. By default, Gantt chart uses finish-to-start dependency, which means that all predecessor tasks must be finished before tasks that depend on them can be started. If dependency links are not used in tasks, they will be included in the chart as parallel tasks. Gantt chart also calculates the remaining effort of the tasks, depending on time spent and estimation values.
There are several options to provide you with the best plan for the work to be completed faster. If you have unlimited resources and don’t need to limit capacity, then the Gantt chart will provide you with the optimized plan to finish all issues as soon as possible, according to their dependency links only.
However, more likely you have limited resources and need to specify the max number of issues you can work on simultaneously. In this case you set the capacity value and choose one of the sorting options:
- Optimized — attempts to order issues in a sequence that results in the shortest total duration.
- Sort by a custom field. For example, priority, start date, due date etc.
- Custom order (backlog). In this case the Gantt chart will plan the issues according to the order you’ve set manually in a saved search.
Once you configure your project according to the guidelines, you can create and share the Gantt chart with your team(s).
Project Templates
You can now select a project type that matches your needs. There are three types of projects available in YouTrack: Default, Scrum and Kanban, each pre-configured with project settings that vary depending on project specifics. For example, when you create a Scrum project, you get Scrum-specific States, Issue Types, workflows, etc. You can also modify project settings after defaults are applied at any time.
Add Custom Field Values from anywhere in YouTrack
If you are a project administrator, now it’s really easy to add custom field values. You don’t have to go to settings and spend time setting up the fields. Open your issue anywhere, on the backlog, Agile board or issue list, and quickly add a new value for the chosen field.
New Color Palette
We have updated the color palette with additional color options. While we tried not to diverge too much from the old palette, now the colors look quite different.
There were several reasons to do this. First, it was previously difficult to tell the difference between priority fields, for example “critical” and “show-stopper” looked alike. Second, the new palette is adapted for color-blind users.
Of course you can always customize the colors for your custom fields in Settings.
Read-only mode
This feature is extremely useful for teams during maintenance or any other kind of upgrades that can affect server stability. First, read-only mode guarantees access to the database files in YouTrack. Second, it allows you to temporary unload the server during activity peaks. Resulting in a significant performance improvement, albeit at the cost of some of the functionality, read-only mode allows you to avoid downtime on a server.
Improvements
YouTrack 7.0 is integrated with a new version of Hub, which brings a lot of useful improvements.
Password Strength Policy
You can now set a password policy to your YouTrack instance, which will be enforced every time users create or change passwords in their YouTrack accounts. As an admin of your instance, you can create any password by default. Once your account is set up, you can go to settings and determine a password strength for your team. By setting a Password Policy, you can increase the overall security of your system and help protect your instance from brute-force attacks.
SAML Support
It is now possible to use your YouTrack profile to log in to external services that support SAML 2.0 authentication, like Zendesk or Google Apps for work. To use this feature, add the services you need to Registered Service Providers.
Revised Permissions Management
In YouTrack 7.0, permissions management becomes really handy as permissions are categorized by applications, YouTrack and Hub. Hub contains general administration permissions, while YouTrack contains issue-specific sets of permissions, grouped by the type of operations they allow performing.
Remove User Profile
Users can now remove their own profiles, while admins can remove other users’ profiles. However, first you should find a replacement for deleted users to keep the history and inherit usages of the account.
To try YouTrack 7.0 on our Sandbox please follow the instructions below:
- For view-only mode (Guest), click here.
- To use YouTrack as a Project Administrator, you should sign up first.
Please notice, as a Project Administrator you will get permissions to modify any projects on the current instance. We kindly ask you to respect each other and not to delete or edit any projects but yours.
Steps to move your newly registered InCloud instance to v7.0:
We will move your instance within one business day.
For the full list of improvements and bug-fixes (it’s huge!), check the Release notes.
It is important to distinguish EAP from traditional pre-release software. The quality of EAP versions may at times be way below even usual beta standards. If you are looking for a stable version of YouTrack, please, visit our site. Please note that once your instance is moved to YouTrack 7.0, it can’t be downgraded back to YouTrack 6.5.
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