Custom Rules at your service!

Targetprocess brings you one of the currently most requested features. Our newly added custom rules allow you to manipulate the default business logic of Targetprocess, for instance you can tell Targetprocess to automatically move the parent User Story into progress as soon as you move the first Task of a User Story into progress or you close a parent User Story as soon as all its Tasks (and Bugs) are done.

There are many more rules to check out. You can find them in Settings → Custom Rules. In this initial release we have implemented a set of most requested rules. For now, it’s possible to switch them on and off. Every single rule has a detailed description, so that you know what it’s meant for.

Some hints and technical details

There are some things to keep in mind while you use custom rules:

• rules are not restricted to any project or process, they will be applied globally;
• rules are executed by a special Rule Engine user, who has any permissions. If a user, lets call her Alice, moved a user story to “In Progress” state, while having no rights to edit a feature, the activated rule “Start a Feature when a User Story has been started” will move the feature successfully anyway;
• rules that mention “Planned” state will work correctly only if there is a state which is marked as “Planned” in the process setup (just naming it “Planned” won’t suffice);
• no error message is shown if a rule fails; however, it may have perfectly legit reason to fail (e.g., a team should be assigned to a project). Please check System Log if you see that a rule wasn’t applied.
• the rules will be available via REST — at /api/v1/CustomRules

What’s next?

We’re looking for your feedback. This release is a first step and we’re very interested in your thoughts about it. Please use the blue feedback button in the upper right corner of the custom rules area, leave some notes on our existing Custom Rules User Voice request or send us an email to ps@targetprocess.com.

There are some questions we’re looking for your help to answer:

• would you like to restrict a rule to specific projects or processes (note: it will also influence custom fields usage in rules)?
• what actions outside Targetprocess would be useful (sending email is an obvious example)?
• would you like to see messages about successful execution of a rule? Would you consider this an unnecessary noise or a way to understand what’s going on?

Although we’re looking for more feedback, we already have some plans for the future, based on the feedback we have already gathered in advance. So, later you’ll be able to create your own rules, with a post-action (when some field or entity is changed, change another field or entity) and a validation-action (when someone tries to change some field or entity, check that such change is permitted). The language will be mostly based on the Advanced Filters.