Hansoft, the leading vendor of tools for project management and QA in the game development industry, will officially launch Hansoft 5.3 during GDC in San Francisco next week.


Hansoft 5.3 contains a number of improvements. One of the most significant is the asset pipeline tool, a feature many developers have been waiting for.


"We have had in-depth discussions with studios for quite some time on how to take the heavy manual work out of managing asset pipelines. Many teams are also experiencing that it's hard to combine an agile process like scrum with the linear nature of asset creation. This became a large and very exiting research project on our side and we are now releasing Hansoft 5.3 where art pipelines can be created in parallel with sign-off workflows to make asset creation more lean," said Hans Andersson, Development Director at Hansoft.


Developers in over 20 countries are using Hansoft for collaborative scheduling, agile, bug tracking and workload coordination. Hansoft is also used on multi site projects, to keep close contacts and daily discussions between teams, even though the geographical distance may be large.


"Every day we get large amounts of great feedback from clients that we use to continuously make improvements of Hansoft. Some updates are small but significant for the everyday user experience and some are large. Like the new report generator. That was originally based on feedback from QA managers that wanted the reporting in the bug database part of Hansoft to be more powerful," said Hans Andersson.


New features in Hansoft 5.3:


* Asset pipeline tool that can manage complex, parallel, and nested flows of art creation in both agile and scheduling projects.


* Workflows tool to edit and apply a workflow on any kind of item in Hansoft. Use it for art sign off, quality iterations or user story testing.


* New report generator. Create and share reports with co-workers using Hansoft's visual query builder, new query language and grouping functionality.


* Updated integration SDK. Access and use pipelines, workflows and reports in a simple manner in the SDK. This enables advanced integration with asset management systems as well as making it easier to integrate Hansoft with external report systems such as executive dashboards and business intelligence tools


* Many improvements on the agile and QA feature sets in Hansoft to make everyday usage of Hansoft even smoother.


* Performance enhancements. Less time to synchronize when you connect to the Hansoft server. Handling a large number of documents over global distances is faster.