Ever got to work and wondered how to start your day? Have you struggled to remember where you left over last Friday? Of course, a member of a team following Scrum should never be in that kind of position. Sprint backlog should be prioritized and the daily scrum should provide all the heads up one needs for the next tasks.

However not all teams start their day with the daily scrum, and nowadays not all team members are even in the same time zone, not to mention other organizational hurdles.

In order to address some of those issues, Flying Donut introduces the first of a series of dashboard updates that allows you to see at a glance a summary of the current state of your projects and highlight the cards on your work list that require your attention.

The main goals of the updated dashboard view are:

• Help you kick start your day
• Provide a high level view of all the projects you are involved
• Make it easy to notice issues early
• Enforce transparency

To achieve these goals, we have redesigned the view to include key metrics from each of the active sprints of the projects you are involved in. These include the sprint progress bar along with some cards showing the current state of the spring, the burndown chart which provides information about how things have gone so far and how things are developing for the future and a verbal summary about how this sprint is going. Of course, links to the project and sprint views are provided to allow quick navigation (an improvement requested by many of our users).

To complete this view, a list of the cards taken up by you is also presented to allow you to dive into a task directly.

We are already working on more dashboard updates to tie in with other Flying Donut features such as discussions and some of our future planned features such as impediments.

As always, we welcome suggestions and feedback from the community both on the current state and future direction of the product. So give the new dashboard a try and let us know what you think.

Happy Scrumming!
The Flying Donut Team.

Dear Flying Donut users and friends!

Our beta release has been live for three weeks now, and it is time to announce our free plan! 

By announcing the free plan, all of our fans will know how far they can go with the free version of our agile project management tool.

Screenshot of the plans

Let’s start by listing what all users get, regardless of the plan they choose. All plans come with:

• Unlimited Public Projects
• Unlimited Participants for Public Projects
• Unlimited Observers for All Projects
• SSL Protection
• Email support
• Community support

When signing up for Flying Donut you’re automatically enrolled to the “Free Donut” plan, which is our free plan of our agile project management tool. ‘Free Donut’ has a limit of one (1) private project with three (3) participants.

What does that mean in practice, and how far can a team of people go with the free version? Well, if it is a team of three people, then they can reach 3 private projects with 3 users. We don’t charge per user!

When the time comes, Flying Donut will charge on a private project basis and set a maximum limit to the participants of those projects. In case you’re wondering, a participant is a user that has read/write access to a project. After all, a user may be participant to one project and an observer to another. Each user can own projects and participate in projects they’re invited to. The bottom line is that the project participant limits are set according to the selected plan of its owner.

In addition, Flying Donut will be free for academic institutions, and students. If you are a student or a an academic institution and you are interested in Flying Donut, contact us at info@flyingdonut.io. Don’t wait until our software goes premium. You can do it right now if you wish.

And of course, an agile project management software that honors itself should offer a free trial period. Therefore, when you sign up for Flying Donut, your account will automatically participate in a 30 day free trial, which allows you to create an unlimited number of projects, and invite as many participants to the projects as you’d like. At the end of the free trial, your account will transition to the ‘Free Donut’ plan, unless you have selected a premium plan.

What happens to the existing beta users? Well, all accounts prior the the premium launch will enrol into the free 30 day trial, just like everybody else signing up at the same day. Of course, all data will remain intact, and no one will notice any difference.

You may find more information in our pricing page.

Keep in mind that Flying Donut is still in beta phase. We haven’t announced the premium plans yet. It is 100% unlimited free, until we go premium.

Enjoy!

Since the launch of the Flying Donut we have received several questions, suggestions and of course minor issues.

We started thinking how to notify people that the issues they reported were resolved and live. We have always used Flying Donut to manage our internal processes, but it was the first time we were going to share this work with others. A lot of our team members have used issue tracking systems before (such as Jira) to share this kind of information, but we thought that the simplicity and agility of Flying Donut would be a good fit for this use case.

So we decided to go for it, and apply Flying Donut’s virtues to the operations domain. The project would be viewable by the public, and at the same time useful to us.

The main question was how to use a tool, that is designed with the principles of scrum, in order to handle support and operations, an area that can be considered as an ongoing project, where the “kanban” methodology seems more applicable.

After some brainstorming we created the project and decided to go with weekly iterations and rotate people in the “support and operations” role. The next step was to organize our work, so we went to the “Backlog” and created the two obvious backlog “Buckets”: “Issues” and “Suggestions”. All feedback we’ve received so far was placed in the appropriate bucket.

The backlog after a week of work

The iteration after its start in review mode

The iteration after its start in execution mode

• The “goal” of each iteration is to resolve the items in order of priority. If the team is not able to fix the items at the bottom those items will be moved to the next sprint.
• A “continuous” deployment model is followed. When an item is scheduled to be deployed (or is deployed) it will be marked as “approved”.
• Items that have not been “started” may have their priority order changed.