We have finally found a talented graphic designer who can do magic with Photoshop and other tools of his trade (including, most incredibly, even pen & paper). Thanks to his input our ideas for the new layout took its current shape.

Our team came up with the idea to move all the information boxes and controls to the right pane which can be shown or hidden. By doing this we recovered plenty of space on the top of the page, which can now show truly important information, for instance the product backlog.
To switch to new layout you have to go to the edit profile page. We have decided to leave the old layout as it is, just in case anyone thinks it is better and still wants to use it. There is a drawback for it of course. Old layout will be left exactly as it is with the 2.0 release. New features will not be available unless you switch to the new layout.
It is not yet decided whether we will keep the old layout forever or not, but we think it is not worth the effort. Let us know if you think otherwise - in the end it will depend on the number of users who decide to stay in old layout.

We developed a powerful planning tool for the product owners. The key purpose of this new screen is to help the product owners predict future of the project. The screen is divided into 3 sections showing the past, present and the future of the project. The project history is summarized with most important statistics: team velocity, length of the product backlog, number of stories done so far, etc. We have introduced a new type of element you can drag around the product backlog: the planning sliders. They indicate the boundaries for the future sprints and besides adjusting them manually you have Banana Scrum distribute them on the backlog automatically for a given team velocity.
Timeline view will be available for everybody during the transition phase (explained below). Later on it will be available only in some paid plans.

This feature has been requested many times. Now you can connect to Banana Scrum through the secure connection. This feature is available in paid plans only.

Banana Scrum is now powered by a Java Application Server, thanks to our JRuby wizzardry. It is much more reliable and about 15% faster.

Motivated by the last problems with our hosting facility we are moving our production from OVH (and we don't recommend hosting anything there). Our new servers are located in the USA and have much better support plus ease of scaling - all thanks to RackSpace Cloud.

With Banana Scrum 2.0 release we want to offer our users a more professional service. It will remain free of charge for small teams with few projects and few users, however if you use Banana Scrum professionally and would like to use our new cool features we kindly request you to select one of the paid plans. We hope to cover the development and hosting expenses, so that we can offer you even better software in the future.

 

Plans differ by the number of active users, projects, length of the product backlog and the attachment storage space. Also some of our new features: access to the Timeline view and SSL encryption will be available only in the paid plans. You can see plan details and choose a plan when creating a new Banana Scrum account or in the admin panel of existing accounts.

Payments in Banana Scrum are currently processed by PayPal recurring subscription (we will add direct credit card processing in the future). System automatically generates and sends the invoices for the service to the selected email address.

 

If you need more security and control over your Scrum tool you can now choose to buy a Banana Scrum Pro license and install Banana Scrum on your own server. You can learn more on the Banana Scrum Pro.

 

We have introduced a new view showing all the details of a single backlog item. It presents the same basic data as when viewed on the product backlog, but there is also the history section with all the changes made to the item, it's tasks, assignments, etc.

We do not have the necessary data about all changes prior to the 2.0 release, but from now on every action will be recorded. This section is available only in the new layout and can be accessed by 'Open in new tab' link.

Now an email is sent when someone assigns/unassigns a user to/from a project. This notification can be switched off by each user in their profile edit form.

Now every tag can have a color assigned. There is a color widget in Tag Management section we are very proud of. We think this feature makes long backlogs much clearer. It the future we also plan to use these colors to generate various charts. By the way - it is now also possible to comment tags.

If you decide you will not use your account anymore you can remove it completely without leaving any data on our servers. We do not charge accounts removed before the end of the try-out period.