We wanted to highlight some of the recently introduced features that has been requested by our users. You may have noticed some of these features already but we thought that it would be good to showcase them in this month’s release notes. This release is largely inspired by our valued users and we’d like to thank you all for your ideas and suggestions. Keep them coming!

Introducing Status Badges

First of all, we’ve jazzed up your task lists with some new status badges. They are shown for tasks that are likely to require your attention. For example, if a task is overdue or blocked by some other task, we highlight them by displaying a badge:

Currently these badges are shown:

• Now (shown when the task was added to the state within one hour)

• Overdue (shown when the task is past it’s due date)

• Due today (shown when the task is due)

• Blocked (shown when the task is blocked by some other task)

• Flagged (shown when the task is flagged as impediment in Jira)

• Highest (shown when the task has the highest Card Priority)

• Critical (shown when the task has the second highest Card Priority)

Badges are displayed in various part of your dashboard where tasks are listed i.e. the Team Status screen, Task Status screen, and in the clickthrough lists that are shown when e.g. clicking the user avatar. There is nothing you need to do in order to activate the badges, they appear when ever there are tasks that meet the above criteria.

Timings for individual tasks

The Timing screen has provided you a good overview on the average lead and cycle times. However, sometimes you may want to know the timings for individual tasks, not just averages for a group of tasks. Sure, we’ve had the histograms in the Timing Overview that allows you to click through to see timings for a specific ranges such as < 1 day or > 30 days. But what if you have some specific task in mind and want to know timings for that specific task? Now there’s a way to do that.

To see timings for any individual task, you just need to know when that task was completed, approximately. Let’s say you wan’t to know the cycle time of a specific task and you know that it was completed some day last week. You can select Cycle time report from the quick menu on the top right corner to see the longer term trend of your cycle time. If you hover the mouse over the chart, you’ll see the averages for the given time period (last 30 days by default).

Just move the mouse horizontally across the chart until you find the correct time period that matches the completion date of the task you’re interested in. You can then click through to see the list of tasks that we're completed within the time period, along with the cycle time of each individual task.

The same functionality is also available in the Reaction time, and the Lead time reports that are available under the same quick menu.

Data export

You can now export the underlying data from the charts in CSV or JSON formats. To trigger an export, select Export data under the main menu. A modal opens allowing you to choose the format. Once selected, a file download process starts.

This feature is available on all plans so go ahead and give it a spin!

Advanced data refresh

Last but not least, we’ve added more options for updating data in your dashboards. The data in your dashboards is automatically updated once per hour, or whenever you make a change in any of the settings. You have probably also found the “Refresh now” link in the main menu that allows you to trigger update any time.

In some rare cases you may want to perform a more comprehensive data update for your dashboards. For example, in the case there was a disconnect between the Screenful connector and the source system for one reason or another. Here are the new Advanced data refresh options:

In the Advanced data refresh settings, you can perform these operations:

• Refresh data (Updates stats for today, same as what is run automatically once per hour)

• Update tasks (Reloads all tasks from the source system)

• Reset (Resets all history but keeps your settings and configuration)

When clicking the Reset button, your existing data is removed and new data is loaded from the API of the source system. You may wonder why the Reset button has skulls in it? The reason is that some of your tasks may have been deleted from the source system and therefore the resulting dashboard may not be equal to what you had previously. We can’t reconstruct the tasks that have been permanently deleted. So we advise to use it with care.

Having said that, there is one great benefit in using the Reset feature: it will reload as much history as is allowed by your plan. If you’re on a Pro plan or higher, 12 months is loaded.

Here’s a great hack: when you create a new dashboard, there’s nothing to stop you from hitting the the Reset button right after the dashboard is created. This way you can top up your history from the default 3 months to as much as 12 months. I wanted to share this little know trick with you just because you read this far, you’ve earned it :)