Product teams are commonly measured on providing a predictable delivery of features for a planned release and need to report on change metrics such as the number of Features added to a release after the release has been approved for development and the number of features dropped/moved to another release. These types of changes are being recorded in the Aha! Activity log but there is no way of being able to create change log reports at the Release level [i.e. Number of features added and number of features dropped/moved] as well as at the Feature level [i.e. this feature changed releases 3x from v6.1 to v6.2 to v6.5].
The requirement is for Aha! to provide release and feature change log reports to help report on these key metrics to the business and to also keep track of any major changes to plans.
Watch notifications of changes are helpful but are for individual events and do not provide the required aggregate view on the scope of changes.
This would save me so much time! I am required to keep records of:
Each feature that is added after development on a release begins.
Each feature that is moved out after development on a release begins.
Each feature that is added after development code freeze on a release begins.
Each feature that is moved out after development code freeze on a release begins.
Each entry has to have the date of change, Aha! url, JIRA url, description, story points, affected clients, feature category, reason for change, and ultimate disposition.
I currently use a combination of Aha! and JIRA to try and find these changes. I am not the only person how makes changes, so I don't always know immediately when it happens.
Thinking of the overall solution we would be looking for, once a release is "locked" (following the planning stages and actively being delivered, perhaps based on start date?), any feature added/removed to/from the release gets noted in a table on the release that we can report on. Any feature that is part of a release at the time of being "locked" gets stamped with the release name. Any subsequent release that feature is added to, following being lock, also gets stamped with that release name (similar to how Jira stamps sprints onto stories when committed). This will give us a history and visibility of features that slide across releases. We wouldn't be looking for a release to be locked in a manner that our product leads are unable to add scope to it, but more seeking an easy ability to see changes to scope mid-delivery. Finally, when shipping a release, this should include a view/report on changes happening during the delivery phase (what was included at launch of the release, what came in/was removed, and what was included at the time of shipping.
This would be valuable for operational reviews, when features are moved to a particular status (Planned > Deprioritized, for example) or dates for deliverables are changed, it would nice to easily be able to report on these or share them in a visualization with our engineering and design counterparts during operational reviews of our roadmap.
It'd be nice to be able to prompt users to add a comment when the deliverable date or launch date changes and that goes into the 'change log' table or view.
By the end of the release, I need to show that we plan ten features for 2021.4; six of them we moved out to 2022.1, 4 we shipped
A simple implementation would be to enable automation to trigger an action that would send data to fields in a custom table.
This visualization request is one of the missing information which we are finding it extremely difficult to share with the Management Board and explain the rationale for the features being moved out from originally planned to later release due to various factors such as Regulatory Enforcement, Market Demand, Low Priority Demand, etc. There is no way to generate a report that captures an aggregated log of previous and revised change. Below information is extracted from Release History View but cannot be extracted into a simple reporting or presentation purpose
Let us know if there are any recent development updates on this front.
I'm being asked by my management to provide a view of feature movement - particularly as we are publishing a roadmap in notebook form, and without comparing those published on different dates there's no easy way to see what's changed. This idea would give us some level of reporting.
Additionally, this will provide us with a layer of governance as currently, there's no wholesale way to catch Features that have inappropriately slipped into a Release that was already scoped and locked. Likewise, should items "slip" to future Releases that shouldn't have (ex: urgent client commits, previously slipped items, etc.), we don't have a quick way to view these in bulk.
Instead, the workaround would be to export the full Feature List for a specific Release on a periodic basis and run a VLOOKUP externally do identify the adds/drops. This is extremely manual and has a higher risk for error due to the time lag.