Recent Posts

No Gears! 1

by Ivan Paramonau - April 30th, 2010

All right, people, and so we did it.

Google Gears add-on isn’t required any longer to access to the projects’ dashboard and other aggregate information. It should still be pretty fast as it was with Gears though.

For those who used Gears, you now may safely uninstall it from your computer. If need be, just clear your cache and reload the page.

Enjoy!

System Update April 09, 2010: Stateful milestones

by Ivan Paramonau - April 20th, 2010

With the latest release, we introduced additional states for the milestones. In fact, instead of two status (planned and finished), we made the states be identical to the ones of other tickets.

Simplified, the flow is this:

Milestone Statuses

The Scrum masters are now entitled to manage the statuses of the milestones. We are working towards adjusting our billing process to switch to milestone billing only. We also will implement the e-signing process to sync project milestones with contracts.

The process we are working on, will look like this:

Milestone Statuses_2

As said, we are working on a legal framework as well as sync mechanisms between project repos and the billing system for automation of the process. So, while we are implementing it, let us start handling it manually. Now that Milestones have statuses, we have a solid foundation for it.

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System Update April 09, 2010: Introducing time-track

by Ivan Paramonau - April 20th, 2010

As you know, we did not quite enforce any time tracking solutions for quite a while. A few existed, and we tried to assemble the most of the commonly used cases.

So, we have rolled out initial version of Itteco’s time track solution. It still does not have the management reports quite yet, but it is already good for individual time track.

There are 3 ways to use it.

1. There is always a timer (on/off for task in progress) on the right toolbar. When you click it, you get the pop-up where you can enter time track one by one.

2010-04-20_17.24.11

You need to select project and milestone to enter task. The “Task” field is the text entry, e.g. it does not automatically link to a task, although there is auto-complete (or radio list to the right), which helps you with the tasks naming.

2. To review and adjust your monthly/weekly/daily time track, you may go to Projects -> Time track and do it there:

2010-04-20_17.25.12

3. There is also a timer choice in most projects’ timelines, whenever any particular ticket is mentioned. You just roll your mouse over and click on the clock.

2010-04-20_17.26.42

It would pop-up the entry form, where you can finalize the recording of time.

So far our time track solution is meant to facilitate analysis on how the time was spent, how to improve the velocity (minimize waste) as well as is meant to increase the transparency of the process.

It is not yet linked to billing, but it will be very soon. So, start tracking your time and let us know what you think.

Achtung – here goes the update! 1

by Ivan Paramonau - April 8th, 2010

All right, ladies and gentlemen. We have been holding the breath for quite a bit. And we are excited to announce that we will start rolling out the new release of our systems tomorrow morning European time.

We do not plan any downtime at all. But if do happen to notice problems – please, report them via support email.

The changes are massive. For example, even though we were going to stick to existing graphical design as much as possible, we wind up having complete new look-n-feel. Not to mention number of great additional features that will become available.

But I am shutting up now so not to tease you to0 much. You will see stuff for your self soon. Please, follow this blog in the coming days as we will be publishing description of new features here (they are so big – almost every feature will be in a separate post!). And of course, don’t hesitate to leave comments to let us know what you think.

New release FTW!

Quick Update: Git Support

by Ivan Paramonau - February 24th, 2010

Hey all!

While we are putting a good deal of effort into preparations of the major release come March, I just wanted to drop a quick note about some minor update in the meantime:

  • that we started supporting Git as one of our repositories. We now support Mercurial, SVN [deprecated ;) ] and Git. We also work to start supporting GitHub as the source control repository

We are holding off with deploying of anything else, as all changes are inter-connected and most of them are horizontal Usability & UX improvements. In other words, even though the platform remain look similar to what it is right now, most of underlying code is being changed.

We are not afraid of taking working system apart to make it better as you can tell, but you should be ready to be patient with us after the release to help us identify minor remaining issues.

Cheers,
Ivan.

System Update December 14, 2009: Community site is now officially on! 1

by Ivan Paramonau - December 16th, 2009

With the recent deployment, we now officially remove ‘preview’ label from our community portal.

Our social network system does not have much features published yet, but lays on the solid foundation and tons of features have just been disabled for the time being.

dec-15-blogs

So, here is what we have released:

  • People’s profiles
  • Social features such as friending, status updates, timelines, wires
  • The blogging engine & platform. For now, only pre-defined public community blogs are enabled and each member can post in the back-end depending on the project/platform roles.
  • Most fabulous feature is that you now may invite people into the community…

We’ve got the following blogs thus far:

  • Tech Rocket Science: all project members are up to write about daily tech challenges they meet as they code
  • Mission Control: is meant for Scrum masters and project managers to blog about the lessons they learned throughout projects
  • App Launch Pad blog is for the showcase of the projects being launched by community members. Only people with the right ‘product owner’ at at least one of the projects are entitled to post.
  • There are also several complimentary blogs such as the one you read (Itteco Magic), covering the features and news of the platform. Itteco corporate site is hosted at the same platform.

To start bloging, click “Blogs”, when page opens – select the blog you want in the context combobox, and hit “New Post” to the right.

The blogs are essential for the knowledge sharing and community building. We encourage everyone to participate in the discussions.

Among the updates of the other system components, we have attempted to resolve the boot time issue for project servers. We aimed for 20 seconds (which is awesome compared to 3-4 minutes that we have had). We will keep working on this issue to make the experience even smoother. As you know, whenever the server is inactive for certain period of time, we put it into sleep. The nap time is often used to roll out updates and do general maintanence.

That’s it for today. Go explorer the new stuff. Let us know your thoughts at suppport repo. If you do not see how to get into the community site, you probably did not opted-in yet. Just select Home -> Join Community in this case.

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For those of you who think you can’t use a whiteboard for agile planning in distributed teams – yes, you can! 2

by Ivan Paramonau - December 5th, 2009
whiteboard

I literally was just going to make a post with title and one screenshot. But I guess I can’t walk away like this and do need to put couple more lines together.

So, here is what you can do with whiteboards at your project repository @ Itteco:

  • Plan stories and other scope elements across the sprints (‘Stories’ view in Control Panel)
  • Plan (including creation) of tasks and other work elements for the individual sprint
  • Filter the whiteboard’s tickets by owner and type
  • Comment on tickets or edit most commonly used fields of any ticket
  • See the status of stories and tickets and change them (by drag-n-drop)
  • See the burn-down chart for the sprint

All in all, it is awesome way for team to keep track of what they are doing within sprint, see what’s happening and what others are doing, especially useful during daily meetings. It makes it easy for product owner and scrum master to keep their backlogs in order too.

While this is a very powerful functionality, it does not (and neither was intended to) cover some other aspects, such as easing understanding of who is doing what, or seeing the list of overall known issues (defects) within the app (for example, when you are about to submit one), etc. Just make your way into Ticket Buckets and you’ll find what you need in those cases.

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Blowing the bubbles

by Ivan Paramonau - November 26th, 2009

All right, this is the feature I take a lot of personal pride. Remember when you were a kid you loved the soap bubbles? Well, you got the same fun now within Itteco platform. It is called Bubbles View.

dashboard-bubbles

Essentially, it represents the milestones in all your projects.

  • The X axis is the timeline. The further the bubble, the more time is remaining until the milestone is due.
  • The Y axis represents the % of milestone completion
  • The radius of the bubble represents the size of the milestone
  • You may filter sprints, builds, releases. You may also choose which ticket types to include and how to calculate the size and % of completion (number of tickets by default)
  • You may drill down from this view (click on the bubble) and it will take you to the detailed view of the milestone in the project repository.

The view is available from the Projects Dashboard. Like any other information there – all data is pulled out of project repositories and is cached locally in your browser. If the repository is temporally unavailable, it would mark it with asterisk and show the local (cached) data.

As with any other data on Projects Dashboard, you may filter this view by individual project (use combobox on top).

Overall, it is one of the features to ease the multi-project environment as it allows you to spot any problems visually (thus, easily). The closer the bubble to today, the bigger it in size, the lower it is – the more concerned you should be about that particular milestone.

By the end of the day, your goal as Scrum Master would be to keep bubbles follow its natural path: up – and – disappear. Have fun blowing your bubbles!

P.S.: I am that proud as I have “sort of’ invented it myself. “Sort of” – because the original idea is inspired by IBM Rational Portfolio Manager back in last century (screenshot here). But since most of you don’t even remember what IBM stands for, not to mention its acquisition of Rational Software, and not even thinking you could have seen their Portfolio Manager, I can safely claim the authorship.

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System update November 11, 2009: Loads and loads of usability improvements

by Ivan Paramonau - November 11th, 2009

Hey, it’s this time of the month again when we roll out a major update to the platform. You may have taken today by the turbulence, though we trust most people did not really feel it (yay! we are getting better at this!)

So, here are the goodies you got today.

Login & Logout

nov11-new-login-form
  • We got rid of HTTP authentication and replaced it with great looking login form
  • You now can log out, so don’t take you chance – don’t leave the door open
  • You should stay logged in for 24 hrs now (was much less before). See, we got to trust you more! :)

Reminder: If you want to change your password, you may do so here. And don’t forget to change your avatar too – we still see icons of strangers here and there.

Web chat rooms auto-join

nov11-chat-auto-join
  • We will now auto-join you into all your chat rooms each time you log in. You don’t want to miss anything, do you?
  • You may opt-out of chat by clicking Leave & Ignore button in the group chat window. If you don’t, you’ll stay joined and will keep receiving notifications about new conversations happening.
  • We also fixed number of minor issues. For example, now all your chat windows positions are sync’ed between all your tabs and all browsers. Also, if you read message in one browser – it will also be gone in all other you have open.

Reminder: there is always Support room if you need any help!

And our biggest changes are in project repositories

nov11-nifty-names-for-reports
  • First off, we renamed Reports into Ticket Buckets and also re-worked the default tickets lists significantly for your enjoyment and easy of tracking (Nifty names of buckets is nothing compared to what’s under the hood). Why “Ticket Buckets”? – You would wonder. Well, that’s how they used to pick the bugs up in old times – right into the buckets. We just wanted to remind you that you are developing software not to pick up bugs, but to have your buckets full of good stuff.
  • nov11-reports-drag-ndrop
  • Under the hood are drag-n-drop lists! Yes, that’s right. Now you can do actions with the ticket lists without leaving the page. You may either drag-n-drop tickets one by one, or check the boxes and move it all at ones (you see this little ‘>>’ button, right?)
  • Besides, in the lists of tickets, if you now click on the ticket number – it’ll open the pop-up form with the most frequently used ticket fields to edit. If you need to see full details – you either click on the headline, or follow ‘Open in Standalone Editor’ at the pop-up.
  • nov11-comment-ticket-on-whiteboard
  • The similar behavior is on the whiteboards now as well. Clicking on ticket # will no longer forward you to ticket details, but would rather open the pop-up to edit ticket details there (thus, letting you stay on the Whiteboard).  As it became redundant, we also eliminated the Edit tab on tickets’ widget and replace it with the option to comment on the ticket.

Well, that’s about it from the major ones. The little ones include numerous UI fixes. Most joyful would perhaps be to know that famous ‘Reply’ button now works on the newly created tickets. And also the source code browser and changeset diff now looks great in Mercurial repositories too.  And search results are nicely formatted now…  Well, don’t get me started.

Thanks for being with us. We keep working hard to make our home a better place!

Awesome Itteco IM 1

by Ivan Paramonau - October 30th, 2009

I am excited to start blogging about Itteco Magic with this post about our built-in instant messaging. Itteco Magic is the blog discovering all sorts of cool features of Itteco platform.

So, instant messaging, eh? With today’s project teams being so distributed, IM is one of these features you can’t really leave without.

Well, we have the answer. Instead of forcing you to refuge to third party IMs, which means hassle on adding and synchronizing your contacts, we give you the built-in IM, which automatically sync’s your contact list with your friends and project peers. Here is what you got so far:

  • Instant messaging based on XMPP protocol. Same login and password as you use for all Itteco components.
  • You may either choose any available 3rd party desktop clients, or stick to our feature-rich web client.
  • We will sync your friends and peers into your contact list so you don’t have to worry about it.
  • Group chat rooms for each of the projects.

Pretty cool, eh?

Here is how the web chat looks like (look for it at the bottom panel of any page):

Itteco web chat

You can chat, see who is online, have multiple chat windows open, resize, move any window around, change your status, etc. etc. And it all will be sync’ed between as many browser windows as you have open. So, wherever you go on Itteco sites – the chat goes with you (yes, we are working so that you may opt-out of it if you use desktop chat client).

Itteco web chat

In addition, – and here is the pure magic – the chat hooks are integrated throughout the web UI. If you see the user’s name – you may roll over and start chat with him without opening your contacts list. Like this:

Itteco web chat

Or, if you see the mention of the project, – same story – roll over and click to jump into group chat:

Check it out and happy chatting!

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