2026-11-02

In the five days since our last note, we shipped to production 36 times.

🎉 Celebrate finished work

Close an item and a short animation plays from where you closed it: the board card, the table row, the Gantt bar or the item's status. DevStride rotates through a whole library, so you won't see the same one twice in a row.

Close several items at once and they share one celebration, and when a parent completes as a result, the celebration climbs to it. Cancelled work never celebrates. Choose All, Calm only or Off at the bottom of the theme menu; your choice affects only you.

📚 Celebrations

🏁 Work can end without being completed

An admin can now mark any custom status as a Terminal status, with an outcome: Completed (Shipped) or Not completed (Cancelled, Won't Do).

Work that ends Not completed leaves your totals, burndown, progress and velocity, stops showing as overdue, and appears muted on the Gantt. Portal customers see Solved or Closed. Nothing changes until an admin marks a status.

📚 Terminal statuses

🔎 One search, and a history that follows you

The box at the top of every screen and Cmd/Ctrl + K are now one search. Open it to see your recent places, or type a name, an item number or a filter such as #board.

My Account → History lists everywhere you've been in the last 30 days. It's kept with your account, so it follows you to any browser or computer.

📚 Search & Recent Places · History

📊 The Gantt table now matches the Items table

In the table beside your Gantt chart, you can add any column, including your custom fields, and edit in place; move with the arrow keys and drag rows to reorder; tick up to 25 rows for the right-click menu and bulk edit. The leading columns stay frozen as you scroll sideways.

📚 Navigating the table

🗂 Sharper lists and filters

• Group by what work rolls up to: on Manage Items and My Work, group every Story and Task under its Project, Epic or other parent type.
• Always show the current sprint: the Cycle filter's Current Cycle moves on by itself as sprints roll over, even in a saved view.
• Advanced Filters do what they say: Parent finds everything beneath an item, and boards hide cards that don't match.
• Saved views that can't open fall back to the page's default view.

📚 Finding and filtering items

🎧 Customer portals and the Service Desk

• Company sign-in: a company's people can sign in with their work account through Microsoft Entra, Okta or any OpenID Connect provider, beside the emailed link or as the only way in.
• Only signed-in customers can submit requests is a new setting. Forms marked public keep their link.
• Finding the right form: the portal's search now narrows request forms too.
• Your logo is bigger on the portal, with an optional dark mode version.
• New names: Suspended is now Held for review, Dropped mail is now Rejected mail, and email addresses and sending domains moved to Settings → Email.

📚 Company sign-in · Customer Support Portal

📝 Knowledge Base and Formwork

• Customers can answer by email: a public reply on an article thread is emailed to the customers in it, and their answer lands back on the article.
• Watchers hear about comments on what they watch. Tick Watcher beside Comments modified in your notification settings.
• Copy a spec's content into the work items you create from it.
• Formwork: teams using OpenRegulatory Formwork can import requirements as specs, see when they change, and send evidence and test results back.

📚 Email replies to customers · Formwork

✨ And plenty more

• Files keep their names when downloaded from an item's Assets tab, and you can paste a screenshot straight into it.
• Child Items shows a count on its tab, and Current Progress can show open workload by persona.
• Fixes: GitHub review notifications deliver again, and a bulk edit is refused as a whole, rather than half applied, when you can't edit every selected item.

📚 Item tabs · Current Progress

🔄 For Azure DevOps users

• Move to Microsoft sign-in: Microsoft is retiring the older sign-in. When you're ready, open Settings → Integrations → Azure DevOps and click Move to Microsoft sign-in. Everything stays linked and nothing is imported again.
• Nothing missed: a 15-minute catch-up picks up anything a change notification missed, each project shows its Sync health, and imported items keep their assignees.

📚 Azure DevOps

✋ One thing to check

Using "Awaiting your reply" on the customer portal? A staff reply no longer changes what the customer sees. A ticket shows Awaiting your reply only while its status is mapped to it, so map a status if you want customers to see it.

📚 Customer statuses