Cycle Control

Inspiration

Our inspiration was to create a product that revolutionizes how Agile and traditional organizations manage releases and programs. We wanted to provide rich functionality for Program, Project and Release managers and teams that will allow them to design and use any processes that control the execution of their initiatives, similar to what JIRA provides for individual issues.

What it does

Lifecycle

The center of the universe for Cycle Control is the Release. Users can define Release life-cycle using:

• series of stages
• quality gates that control the transition from stage to state
• milestones
• checklists

Scope and Roll-up

The release scope or content can be defined in a bottom-up fashion to be any combination of multiple JIRA projects, versions, components, JIRA Agile boards, Epics or sprints. Cycle control will automatically roll-up all data from these containers.

Metrics

For each release users can define their own custom metrics, which can:

• be defined using JIRA Query Language (JQL)
• use issue count and numeric aggregations, for example: Total Open Bugs, Unestimated Issues, Total Backlog Estimate, Release Burn-down, etc
• show historic trends
• provide in-depth analysis of changes between two dates

Release Calendars

Releases are visualized on beautiful interactive Calendars. Users can create multiple calendars and choose any number of releases.

Release Types

Release types act as templates and drive consistency across the organization.

How I built it

The visualization top layer is pure Javascript using AUI components, VisJS and backbone.js. The middle layer containing the business logic is written in Java and uses technologies like EMF for modeling. The bottom layer provides bi-directional synchronization with native JIRA objects such as workflows, issue-types, schemes and issues.

Challenges I ran into

The main areas of innovation were related to the native synchronization with JIRA objects. A lot of the configuration is created on the fly - workflows, issue types, etc.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We think our Metrics module is one of the best in the JIRA eco-system. The native synchronization works like a charm and allows us to provide superb user experience while enabling users to access and report on native JIRA issues.

What's next for Cycle Control

We are actively working on integrating Risk factors and Trends. Dependencies and integration between Releases is the next big module.

Built With

• emf
• java
• javascript
• jira
• jira-sdk
• visjs