Easy Agile Programs 3.0.0 - Digitising the SAFe Program Board
Release Date: 25th June 2020
The team at Easy Agile is happy to announce the release of Easy Agile Programs 3.0!
Team Swimlanes on the Program Roadmap
We’ve been iteratively chipping away at digitising the SAFe Program Board.
In version 2.3.0, we brought you Feature level dependencies and Milestones to the Program Roadmap. Read the full release notes here.
In Easy Agile Programs 3.0, we’ve continued to improve upon the digital Program Board experience by introducing Team swimlanes on the Program Roadmap. Introducing Team swimlanes enables Release Train Engineers and Business Stakeholders to highlight feature delivery dates, feature dependencies amongst teams and relevant milestones.
When you edit your Increment Roadmap, you will now see a swimlane called Shared Team Features plus a swimlane for each of the Team Boards that have been included in your Program.
You can now drag issues from your Roadmap Backlog, into a Team’s swimlane to visually communicate which issues will be worked on by which Team, or into the Shared Team Features swimlane to show when an issue requires the effort of multiple teams.
Only the issues that have been dragged into a Team’s swimlane + the issues in the Shared Team Features swimlane, will appear on the Team Planning Board.
Improving the Roadmap Backlog Filtering
Alongside the new swimlanes, we’ve also introduced new filtering functionality to assist with the Increment Roadmap creation experience.
Dedicated Roadmap Boards
Quick filters are now available for the Roadmap Backlog when your Program is configured to use a dedicated Roadmap Board as the source of the Roadmap issues.
Quick filters from the dedicated Roadmap Board will now be available to filter the Roadmap Backlog for more focused scheduling.
Improving Roadmap Visibility on the Increment Overview
We were hearing loud and clear from our customers that the UI of the Increment Overview was not scaling when working with a large numbers of issues.
It was difficult for Program Managers and Release Train Engineers to understand which Team’s were responsible for Features/Epics when all the Roadmap issues were condensed into a single Roadmap at the top of the page.
In Easy Agile Programs 3.0, each Team will now see their assigned Features/Epics below their Team swimlane.
Shared Team Features
At the top of the Increment Overview, teams will see the Shared Team Features swimlane. Only Features/Epics scheduled into the Shared Team Features swimlane will appear here.
Team Based Roadmaps
Each Team will now see their assigned Features/Epics beneath their Team Swimlane.
Clicking on a Team’s assigned Features/Epics will filter their scheduled work.
All Team’s Features/Epics can be collapsed to focus on the specific issues scheduled in Team Sprints. Reducing the visual noise allows the teams to more easily identify dependencies.
More Focused Team Planning Experience
Seeing every Feature/Epic scheduled in a Program Increment made it extremely difficult for teams to identify which Features/Epics they were meant to be working on in their Team Planning Boards.
In Easy Agile Programs 3.0, we’re reducing the visual noise by only displaying Features/Epics that are scheduled specifically in your Team’s swimlane. You’ll also see any Features/Epics scheduled in the Shared Team Features swimlane.
Bugfixes
We squashed a tonne of bugs in this release, including:
Collapsing the Roadmap in IE11 caused the Sprints to justify to the left of the screen
Clicking on the newsfeed button in IE11 would sometimes crash
The pins on the end of dependency lines in IE11 were not rendering correctly
Quick creating issues on the Team Planning Board was sometimes not focused
Missing tooltip on issue description text
Inconsistency between status colours in the issue view vs. on the cards
Increment Overview single line cards would overflow into each other
Creating new Features on the Roadmap backlog wouldn’t apply board filters
Features created on the Roadmap Backlog, from a dedicated Roadmap board would not pre-populate with the correct Project
Symmetrical issue links (i.e. relates to) only worked with the Roadmap in one direction
+ Milestone and button was visible to users who did not have the Manage Programs permission
The 'x' to remove a Milestone was visible to users without the Manage Programs permission
Special Thanks!
For such a significant release we have a tremendous number of folks to thank. We wanted to say a big thank you to our customers Marc, Mark, Bob, Danny, Cedric, Mike, Ahfaaz, Gerben, Andreas, Markus, Chris, Wouter, Nikita, Madhu, Arun, Saurabh, Gavad, Jeff, Paul, Sebastien, Haddon, Rohit, Brian, Adriana, and our Easy Agile partners.
Thank you for all your continued support and encouragement as we work to improve Easy Agile Programs! We can’t succeed without your insight and recommendations for improvement. Reach out directly via the 
button at the top of any page in Easy Agile Programs for help or to provide feedback.
Teagan Harbridge, Product Manager, Easy Agile
Finally, a huge thanks to the Easy Agile team for stepping up and delivering this significant release while navigating our new work from home situation. You are superb, thank you!
Nick Muldoon, Co-CEO, Easy Agile