The summer of 18 updates

While most were preparing their beach body for the summer the last months, our developers have been crunching their code to give you a set of great new Binocs features. Read-on for details about what’s new…

An extra option to manage expertise

Before, when requesting expertise a user always needed to specify how many hours he/she needed per week, month or quarter. Handy in a lot of cases, but a lot of users have use cases where this isn’t ideal. For example they want to input the following:

1. I need 10 days spread between 01/01/2018 and 31/03/2018
2. I want to squeeze the work –> for example change the end date to 15/02/2018
3. This should spread the 10 days equally again but in the shorter time period

We put our heads together and built a brand new toggle in Binocs demand. From now on you have 2 options to input expertise.

Option 1: binocs spreads the hours equally

• In this case the user can specify the quantity, unit, start date and end date and Binocs does the rest (spreading the hours equally between start and finish)
• Note that in this mode you have the option to push the demand 1 week / month etc.

Option 2: you spread the hours

Toggle the button and manage the expertise yourself. You indicate when you need how many hours, days or fte. And the best thing is, you can switch between modes seamlessly

By the way, we improved the manage expertise pop up as well. It’s almost full screen and has a horizontal scroll bar so you can edit as you would be working in Excel.

Change the team in demand without hassle

When you want to change the requested team in demand it used to be harder than it should to change the requested team. From now on it’s dead simple, click the team and all teams that can perform the requested service are listed. Choose and you’re done!

Show demand dates in the format of your choosing

We added a system parameter where you can choose how dates are shown in the demand tree. American, European or another custom format or show them as a week number.

Better visualization of your schedule with full screen mode and print functionality

Use every pixel of your large screens in the lab to show the team schedule with the full screen option of the schedule board. Want to have it on paper, no problem. Print the schedule for this and next week immediately.

Better communication with notes in the schedule

You have a problem while executing a scheduled activity that needs to be communicated to your scheduler/team lead? Just add a note and discuss it during your team meeting.

During the meeting you search for all activities with a note and start discussing

Run the scheduler today or tomorrow

When you run the scheduler early in the morning you might want to reschedule today. But if you run it later in the day, you want to keep your schedule stable (to avoid phrases such as: this activity wasn’t there this morning when I checked the schedule). So now both options are available when running the scheduler.

Duplicate activities in the schedule

If the execution of your test failed you have to schedule a retest. It couldn’t be easier with the duplicate activity feature. Just copy the activity and schedule the copied activity tomorrow.

The usual

In addition to the major improvements above, we have been shipping smaller updates, fixes, tweaks, and performance improvements as well.

Thanks for following along, and thanks for all the feedback along the way.

All the best,

— The team at Binocs