Card transitions and transition only properties are a very useful way for project administrators to enforce a project workflow. Likewise, card walls and the Mingle grid view are useful ways for an Agile project team to easily visualize and update the status of cards in their project. Mingle 2.1 sees the introduction of automated transitions which combines the card wall concept to update card status, as provided in Mingle's grid view, with the workflow enforcement provided by card transitions. Simply, automated transitions allow the team to update and view their project status quickly whilst also ensuring other important data is captured.

A common example of a status update that happens frequently and needs to be efficient is the story wall status update. This update also often requires extra reporting data to be captured which is not provided by using the grid view alone.

Consider a standard story wall which is tracking the status of stories in a given release or iteration. Generally this wall is divided into status lanes that indicate the current state of stories in the project e.g. 'ready for development', 'in development' and 'closed'. In the simplest scenarios team members will move cards from one state to another as the project progresses. The grid view is a good way to represent this scenario in Mingle. However, for those projects where tracking and reporting information such as the date a story moved between states is required, Mingle transitions need to be used to ensure the tracking information is provided at the same time as the status update. Transition only properties are one way to ensure values are only updated using the transitions and therefore, ensure that supplementary tracking information is also updated. Using transition only properties in transitions previously meant that the ease of movement on the grid view was restricted to enforce the workflow. This is where automated transitions bridge that gap - they allow quick update of cards properties using the grid view but also ensure any required data and workforce is achieve by triggering transitions when cards are moved in the grid.

To automate transitions on the grid view project admins will need to ensure they have the required transitions set-up and that these transitions are updating transition only properties. They can then group by the transition only property on the grid view and any card movements between states that match a transition will trigger the transition to be automated. For example, to create the automated story wall the admin would need to complete the following steps:

1. Create a card type called 'story'
2. Create a card property called 'status' with values of 'in development' and 'closed'
3. Set 'status' property as transition only

   

4. Create a reporting property called 'development complete on'
5. Create transitions that updates stories which are 'in development' to status 'closed' and sets the 'development complete date' as today

   

6. Create a grid view and filter cards by 'story' type and group by property 'status'. This is the story wall

   

7. Move stories between the 'in development' lane and the 'closed' lane

   

8. The transition is triggered

   

   The stories are automatically updated with the 'development complete date'

   

• Transitions will only be automated on the grid view - for Mingle and projects admins, who can update transitions only properties in other views, any updates not made on the grid view will not automate transitions.
• Property updates can only be automated if transitions are created - for example, although a transition may have been created to update cards with 'in development' to 'development complete' the reverse transition may not have been created. In this instance if the cards are dragged in the reverse direction to 'in development' from 'development complete' then an update will not be made and the user will be informed.

  

• Property updates can only be automated if the group by property on the grid view is transition only - if transitions are created to update properties that are not transition only then dragging and dropping cards to update this property value will not automate transitions. These properties can be updated independently and do not require transitions to be updated.

• Create card transitions
• Modify or Delete card transitions
• Apply transition only properties

• About card transitions
• About card properties
• Customizing projects