JetBrains, the maker of integrated development environments for programming languages, today announced an extensive update to YouTrack, a project management and knowledge base tool.

Using YouTrack, software development teams, DevOps teams and nontechnical users can plan out projects easily by adding tasks into a workflow. The tool itself allows teams to visualize simple or complex workflows all at once by delivering a “bird’s eye view” in a flow chart from beginning to end.

The biggest improvement within this update is the addition of interactive Gantt charts, Elena Pishkova, product marketing lead at YouTrack, told SiliconANGLE in an interview.

“Over the past few years, we’ve been moving YouTrack toward being closer to the needs of teams working in industries that aren’t just software developers but who work in industries such as healthcare and communications who use the software for more nontechnical projects,” Pishkova said.

A Gantt chart is a method for visualizing a schedule of activities on a timescale with bars representing the estimated beginning and end dates of the tasks along the timeline. The chart can also make it possible to link bars to one another so that it’s possible to tell which tasks flow into one another. As a result, it’s also possible to tell at a glance what activities are happening in parallel and what will be completed and when.

Using the new interactive charts, a team can easily drag and drop new tasks onto the timeline and have them automatically added to the project, set their start and end times and YouTrack will add them to the workflow.

Each task can also be set with dependencies on other activities including end before, start after and run within. As a result, the interactive Gantt chart can do its own estimated time tracking. That means that after the task is dropped onto the chart, it can be stretched or squished and other tasks on the timeline will move in comparison (changing their time tracking estimates).

“This is a very popular project time management capability,” Pishkova said. “And you don’t need to switch out of YouTrack to external software to use it. It is both a long-requested feature for our software and also a feature often seen in the industry used by teams in their project planning.”

Other improvements to YouTrack include support for state-machine rules in the visual workflow builder that allows easier construction of dependencies between tasks. For example, “if-then” diagrams between activities for when certain tasks are completed, allowing for branching timelines. Also, the search bar now lets users discover issues based on the attributes linked to them.

It’s possible for users to experiment with the interactive Gantt charts without rescheduling important tasks or live projects by generating a demo project. Alternatively, new users can sign up for a free YouTrack InCloud account and use it as a sandbox to try it out.

“The interactive Gantt timeline is a fundamentally novel approach to project planning and task management in YouTrack and it opens up a new dimension for further development,” Pishkova said.

That’s not all. Pishkova said Gantt provides whole new opportunities for visualization and project scheduling, and the YouTrack team intends to expand it with future updates.

Photo: Pixabay; Image: JetBrains