Imagine the challenges of rolling out a new agile planning tool to thousands of developers. Or to onboard new developers quickly in your agile and lean teams. Imagine the productivity gain with quick and effective scrums and easy triaging of defects. Imagine being on top of your personal work schedule, always …

When we brainstormed on a new way of planning quickly and intuitively, these are some of the use cases we wanted our planning tool to address. And thus we introduced the Quick Planner in Rational Team Concert (RTC) version 5.0.2. Now, 3 years later, building on the reviews from our users and our self-hosting experience, we have Quick Planner in its new avatar.

Quick Planner in RTC version 5.0.2 was designed to provide an intuitive task based UI for rapid creation, review and planning for work. Our design team focused on the following goals:

• Easy to use: Intuitive design for frequent agile tasks.
• Super fast: Less clicks to do simple tasks and display very large plans instantly.
• Custom views: Share views (queries) across teams/users.

Here is a demo video that I had created which shows how we use this version of Quick Planner:

We have learned a great deal from our first generation RTC Quick Planner, getting feedback from our users – much of which has gone in as features over the years. We continue to keep it simple by making it easy to task out a story, or do iteration planning. That’s our primary goal – keep it simple, for ease of use, and rapid agile adoption with developers.

We have also been conscious of performance (after all Quick Planner has to be quick!), and we have changed how Quick Planner fetches plans so that very large plans with thousands of work items load very quickly without waiting. It loads the first 50 items and when you scroll through the plan we incrementally fetch more work items rapidly.

Now we are taking the next step with RTC Quick Planner Next. We want things to be even simpler and we want users to have the freedom to create task boards as easy as they do physical boards, and in a way that their yellow stickies all find their way into the plan!

We hope RTC Quick Planner Next will make RTC simple to use for the agile developer as a tag based planning tool, while retaining the power of RTC to support process customization.

As software becomes more mission critical and complex, we believe we have the right balance for BOTH ease of use and process control to help agile teams as well as organizations adopting lean and agile principles.

For RTC Quick Planner Next we are leveraging the latest modular UI technology, React.js, to create responsive, fast UIs. RTC Quick Planner Next is now available as a technical preview in 6.0.4. Our focus for this effort was to respond to customer feedback and make RTC tracking and planning:

• Even simpler: Just two board views – Work boards and Plan boards.
• Flexible: Mix tag based and process based swim lanes in the boards.
• Customizable: As easy to build and update as a physical board.
• Even faster: (using React) No UI spinners, no wait time for developers; You can focus on getting work done, not tracking it.

Here is a demo video I have created that highlights the cool new features of RTC Quick Planner Next:

We would love for you to try it out and we are eager to hear from you in us your feedback in [CCM]Quick planner phase 2 – parity, product integrations (417753)

Sharoon Shetty K
Technical Lead, Tracking and Planning, Rational Team Concert, Persistent Systems
sharoon_kuriyala@persistent.com