Focus on product value and product relevancy

Traditional "waterfall" methods of project management combined with lack of customer involvement hinder your ability to create relevant products! Without customer feedback incorporated into product development iterations companies end up creating products that are irrelevant and are not embraced by the market.

Yoxel has been specifically designed to support adaptive model of product development and customer collaboration which means that from now on your projects can be planned in context of product value and relevancy to your customers:

• Set up your key customers with isolated support portals through which they can give you important feedback regarding product requirements, enhancement requests, bugs and priorities.
• Keep your customers involved and informed by communicating details of implementation progress of their requests.
• Use the customer feedback to do better prioritization during project/iteration planning.

Significantly simplify project planning process

In many companies project planning is driven by one person (project manager) trying to analyze too much data, and coordinate too many things, using multiple tools that were not designed to communicate to each other. The result is that he/she becomes a bottleneck of the planning process, it takes long time, and the risk of ending up with a bad plan is too high.

With Yoxel, project planning is a smooth collaborative process where the project manager can stay in charge without becoming the bottleneck, and in no time create very accurate project plans that are supported by your whole team:

• Leverage your existing backlog and forget about re-entering tasks and requests just for the sake of a project plan! Connect to Yoxel Request Tracker or your existing bug-tracker (Bugzilla, Mantis, GNATS, Retrospectiva) and grab important items from there with a few clicks of your mouse.
• Benefit from team collaboration! Your team members can contribute to creating the plan in parallel hence significantly shortening the time to get all the right data in place.
  • Allow a few selected project members to add requests/tasks to the plan. This will help you make sure you have not forgotten anything important.
  • Allow the selected project members to vote for the requests/tasks in the plan. Mitigate the risks of incorrect prioritization in isolation. Listen to the expert opinions within your team.
  • Quickly get implementation and testing estimates for all tasks in the plan. All estimates can be entered directly by engineering and qa. With complete estimates for all the requests in the plan you start seeing the whole picture of how long the project may take.
  • Allow engineering and qa managers do resource allocation for you, they know the best who should be doing what. Easily check how well your resource load is balanced.
• Accurately plan multiple projects! For any team member participating in more than one project or working part time enter his time-sharing parameters and let Yoxel do appropriate scaling of all his perfect-time estimates.
• Promote open collaboration in your team! With the collaborative environment and the planning panels open to all team members you can expect clearer communication, better quality of produced plans, and more support in critical decision making.

Always have clear visibility into project execution

Project management is not just about planning, executing on the plan is where the real work takes place. The key to success here is clear communication within your team and good visibility into projects' status. Yoxel provides mechanisms tailored to improve the communication between people working together on a project:

• Automatically get real-time status updates for all individual requests/tasks from your backlog.
• Avoid unpleasant surprises through smart alerts generated by "planned vs. actual" monitor.
• Accurately predict the time required to implement and test the remaining portion of a project.
• Know exactly what requires your attention, according to your role and responsibilities.
• Get feedback from each team member regarding risks, issues, and recommendations

Customizable reports and project progress charts

Another quite challenging task for engineers and project managers is to provide accurate and timely information to their management and customers in traditional formats. Yoxel allows you to generate various reports and charts pertaining to the real-time status of your projects and predicted remaining work.

• Add custom fields for all requests from your backlog. Fill them with specific information that needs to show up in your reports.
• Generate custom, template based reports in HTML, PDF, Excel. Hold your team meetings with everyone having a hard copy.
• Use dynamically generated GANTT charts to reflect project progress and predictions for the remaining work.
• Generate burndown charts to visualize your projects status in an alternative way and detect certain trends.

At YOXEL SYSTEMS we have developed a web-portal platform with flexible workflow, controlled customer access, request tracking and project management engines. This platform allows us to easily build new powerful web-based tracking, project management, collaboration applications.

All Yoxel applications are built on top of Yoxel web-portal platform that consists of the following components:

• Customer Access Control: Your customers can access your Yoxel account and have limited permissions for using the system. You control which of your customers have access and what they can see.
• Authentication: Username/password protected secure SSL connection for all employees and customers of your company.
• Administration and Customization: The first user to register your company with us becomes a master user (MU) with unlimited privileges to your company's account. He/she can add other users (including MUs), enter product and component names for RTS, and enter customer information. In short, he/she can configure the environment so your other users can all start using it easily.
     Management hierarchy (manager vs. reporter relation) can be specified at the time your master user or an existing manager adds a new user. Managers usually own product or component responsibilities and have more administrative permissions than regular users.
• Import and Synchronization: Import requests from an external Bug Tracking System like Bugzilla or GNATS. Do automatic synchronization with the external Bug Tracking System.
• Client Databases: Your company's data is stored in a separate database. All databases are backed up daily and stored in two different geographical locations. We can also provide you an ftp access to the backed up copy of your company's database.

  Concerned about keeping all your data on our server? Open source version of Yoxel Systems is available for download at SourceForge. Install it on your server and let us know if you need any help.

Free Open Source

Our open source version is distributed under GNU license. You can download it for free and install on your Unix server.

LAMP powered

Our software is riding on a fast growing open source enterprise software stack LAMP (Linux,Apache,MySQL,PHP) which is used by more and more companies as an alternative to expensive proprietary software stacks. Actually our development servers are FreeBSD so it not just Linux but any Unix system.

SaaS / On-Demand

We also host Yoxel on our own servers and offer it as on-demand service. Important aspect is that we do not lock in your data, that is, if you request we give you your MySQL database and you can easily switch to the open source version of Yoxel installed on your premises.

Security

Our web-site has security measures in place to help protect against the loss, misuse, and alteration of the data under our control. For details please read our Privacy Notice.

Dynamic HTML / Javascript UI

For smooth and convenient interaction with our system we employ the key web2.0 technologies: dynamic html, javascript, server calls in iframes (alternative to ajax). Our dashboards engine is one good example where all these technologies are used: with just a few mouse clicks you can rearrange and re-configure the layout of your dashlets on each dashboard page.

External bug-tracker connectors

When transitioning to Yoxel it is often quite important to be able to connect to your existing bug tracker. We have developed a number of HTTP based connectors that allow Yoxel to connect to and synchronize with web based bug-trackers: Bugzilla, GNATS, Mantis, Retrospectiva, ...