2026-10-26

In the week since our last note, we shipped to production 27 times. Boards you can slice any way you like, an assistant that understands your code, and clients who work alongside you instead of just filing tickets. Here are the highlights!

🗂 Group any board by any field

One of our most requested features is here! Every board can now group its work by Team, Assignee, Persona, Priority, Item Type, Color, Labels, Parent or Workstream. See each person's load at a glance, split a sprint by team, or line work up under the feature it belongs to.

Grouping works in both card view, as swimlanes, and table view, with totals for each group. Drag an item into another group and its field changes to match: move a card into Priya's lane and it is assigned to Priya.

📚 Board views · Track and move work

🤖 Your AI Assistant now reads your code

This one is a very big deal. Connect GitHub and the AI Assistant can read the code in your repositories: it searches the code, reads any file on any branch, and sees the pull requests linked to each item, with their reviews and checks. It only reads, and it shows you the files and pull requests it used.

That means the people writing specs, tracking progress and reviewing work can ask about the code itself, without opening an editor:

• "Does the code in the pull requests on I402 fully cover the acceptance criteria in its description?"
• "Did each pull request on this epic come with the tests it should?"
• "Before I write this spec: where do we calculate invoice totals today, and what would this change touch?"
• "What is still missing for this feature to be done?"

Also new: admins can see each month's cost by model and member and set budgets, paid models land as one line on your invoice, and answers come faster and fuller, even on the biggest questions.

📚 Ask about your code · Settings and permissions

✅ Clients sign off your work in their portal

Build things for your own customers, or work where approval is part of compliance? This is for you. Agencies and product studios get a clear, recorded yes from the client before calling work done. Teams in regulated fields, such as medical device manufacturing, get a sign-off trail that records who approved what, and when, right on the work item.

Finished a feature? Send it to the client for sign-off without leaving the item. Choose the company, write a short title and summary for them, add a link to the feature or a walkthrough video, and press Send. Their reviewers get an email, open a new Reviews page in their portal, and click Approve or Request changes with a note.

Their decision lands on the work item for your whole team to see, the sender is notified, and two new automation triggers, Client Approved Review and Client Requested Changes, can move the item on by themselves. Clients see only what you write for them, never your internal notes. Proposed changes to a client's published spec appear on the same page, so a client can approve a spec change in one click.

To start, an administrator grants the new Send Items For Client Review permission (Owners have it already).

📚 Client Reviews

📝 Specs you write together with your clients

The Knowledge Base grew into a full spec-collaboration space this week:

• Clients draft their own specs. Open a category to client drafts and a signed-in client can write a spec with rich text and attachments, edited together with their colleagues. Every save is kept in the history under their name.
• Comments pinned to exact words. Select a passage and pin a review comment to it. Highlights open the thread, pins survive edits, and clients can pin comments from the portal too.
• Spec stages. Define stages such as Client draft or Ready for development, filter and search by them, and let clients see where their spec has got to.
• Approval for published changes. In a category that needs approval, an edit to a published spec becomes a proposed change. A publisher compares it side by side with the live version and approves it, or the client does.
• Watch articles and categories to hear about new versions, stage changes and approvals.

📚 Client spec drafts · Pinned review comments · Spec stages · Approval for published changes · Watching

🎧 A Service Desk that fits your way of working

• Run it headless. Have your own support front end? Switch on headless mode and every customer message goes to your webhook instead of email. With the Partner API, your app posts customer replies, records staff replies and reports delivery receipts, using only an API key.
• A friendlier portal. Request forms sit under groups you arrange, the request tabs show counts, and customers can group My requests by status, importance or form. You can also post a notice banner on any company's portal.
• Contacts stay in step with their people. A contact whose email belongs to a DevStride account follows that account's email changes, and duplicates merge.

📚 Headless mode · Partner API · Customer Support Portal

🔐 Security and admin

• An Authentication log shows who signed in, how, when and from where, for 90 days.
• Passwords no longer need a symbol, so your browser's suggested passwords just work.
• Single sign-on errors explain themselves more clearly, and Settings has a new Admin section.

📚 Authentication log · Enterprise SSO

✨ And plenty more

• Microsoft Teams: admins can install the DevStride app for chosen people right from the Teams panel.
• Estimates: optimistic and pessimistic estimates can be made optional.
• Templates: a new Year question sets dates to the same day in the chosen year.
• A livelier interface: the logo glints when something saves, colours glide between areas, and the header takes on each page's colour.
• Fixes you'll feel: saves hold steady while other workspaces run big bulk edits, list bullets show on every computer, people pickers hide archived members, and notification settings save for everyone.

📚 Microsoft Teams · Time estimation · Template variables · Themes and appearance