Loads of news from the garage

During the last few weeks we've been thrilled that the Agilefant 2.0 has obtained widespread attention in the open source community. This, among other factors, has driven us to really consider our code quality and documentation. We've worked to ease the future development of the Agilefant; of course all this has happened in addition to implementing new features!

User load has been one of the main development areas during previous weeks. User load consists of four main areas: assigned tasks, unassigned tasks, baseline load and future estimated load. 

Assigned tasks are divided evenly among assignees, this we've had already since the Agilefant 1.3 series.

Unassigned tasks are divided among iteration assignees, yes iteration nowadays have assignees, each user has per iteration availability factor which determinates the portion of unassigned load the user will receive for that iteration. Say Pete's availability factor for iteration X is 100% and Matt's is 50%, Pete will receive twice the amount of unassigned load that Matt gets for the iteration X.

Baseline load can be set for projects and iteration in per user basis. This is a weekly baseline that assumes a five-day-week.

Future load accounts for iterations that have no stories or tasks, then the estimated size for the iteration is considered to be the total amount of unassigned load in that iteration.

But there's more, users can add vacations for themselves, no load will be assigned to these vacation periods. Workload that would be in a vacation period is divided before and after the vacation, depending on the calendar interval for each affected iteration.

We hope that our new daily graphic representation of the user load will give people more precise tools to plan their workload and transparency to other organizational levels how busy people actually are.