Similar Tickets – New feature on BootStrapToday

Next released is scheduled for 1st Week of January, 2012.

In this release we will be adding a new tab on Ticket details called “Similar”. Under “Similar”, you will see other tickets which are very similar to the ticket in context.

Following are 2 important reason behind adding this functionality:

1. If there is any duplicate ticket, it can be quickly identified and closed.
2. If new team member joins a team and is assigned a bug. Ideally she will debug the code to find the problem. This is time consuming activity. Debugging time increases as your code becomes more complex. Now once this feature is available, team member can check for similar tickets and files modified for those tickets under similar tab. This can give team member hint on where she should be looking to fix this bug.

We hope this feature will add to overall team productivity , which we envision. What do you guys think?

Multitasking and productivity

A project manager is always watching/tracking any potential ‘schedule risks’.  You can track/identify some types of risk looking at milestone status, how many tickets/tasks completed, how many tasks not yet done relative to available time, etc.  These are quantitative indicators. However, there are other  ‘qualitative’ indicators of ‘schedule risks. One of the ‘qualitative’ indicator of schedule risk is ‘multi tasking’.

If your team members are ‘multi tasking’ then chances are high that you may miss the next deadline. Check a few articles on problems of multi tasking

1. Multi-Tasking: Why projects take so long and still go late
2. Multitasking Madness Decreases Productivity
3. Human Task Switches Considered Harmful
4. Just search for ‘multitasking productivity‘ or ‘project multitasking‘

If multitasking is such a serious risk, then obviously a project manager needs a some quick way to detect this risk.

Using BootStrapToday, you can quickly identify if you are facing the risk of multi-tasking in your project. Just check the Project Dashboard, ‘who is doing what‘ section. This section describes, which user is working on what ticket/task ? It displays  ‘in-progress’ tasks as button. So the user who has 3 or more buttons in front of his name is probably multi tasking.  Its a good idea to check with him. May be he has already finished a task but not marked it as resolved or closed. In that case, there is no serious risk. However, he may actually be working on 5 tasks simultaneously and this can cause serious problems to project schedule.

Using BootStrapToday-Who is Doing What to detect multi tasking

BootStrapToday Release Notes

On last weekend we made a new release of BootStrapToday containing many bug fixes and enhancements, following is the list of  features added in last release

1. Revamped email notifications:
   • Option to configure project level notifications, add a cc list to track all changes, notify me for project  manger
   • Notification for new files attached to ticket
   • Notification for ticket comments
   • Notifications related to fileshare, option to notify all project members on file upload.
2. Participants field on tickets :
   Many times we want to keep many other people in the loop who are not part of the ticket but they still want to  receive notification and monitor developments on the ticket to achieve this objective participant field is added to tickets.
3. Support for ticket creation & updation through email :
   Many time we are on the move and do not have access to web but want to quickly add comment to a ticket or create a new one, to get more details read BootStrapToday now supports Email Interface
4. Natural sort on ‘subject’ in the ticket list table. 
   Natural sort results more inline with ‘human’ expectations. For example, sorting  ‘1. xyz’, ‘2. xyz’ and ’11.xyz’ by standard dictionary sort will result in ‘1.xyz’, ’11.xyz’ and ‘2.xyz’. Generally this not expected by the user. The using natural sort the results are in ‘1.xyz’, ‘2.xyz’ and ’11.xyz’.
5. Hyperlinks in Ticket description and comments:
   • If there are any hyperlinks (like http://google.com), in ticket description and comments, there links are now a ‘click-able’ hyper links.
   • If ticket description, comment contain references to other tickets in any project in the account, then these are converted to ‘click-able’ links. For example, lets assume there are two projects in account XPRJ and YPRJ. User is adding a new tickets in project XPRJ. In the description he adds references to XPRJ-5 (i.e. a ticket in XPRJ project) and YPRJ-7 (i.e. a ticket in project YPRJ). After ticket is saved, user is redirected to ‘ticket details’ page. On the details page, now the references to XPRJ-5 or YPRJ-7 will be ‘click-able’ links. When user clicks on XPRJ-5 link, he will go directly to XPRJ-5 details page.
   • If the referenced ticket (e.g. YPRJ-7) is closed then it will be shown with a strike-through line.
6. Fileshare improvements:
   Now you can add description to your uploaded file and notify project members of uploaded files. Fileshare UI is also improved.
7. Quick Create and Quick Edit Ticket action has been added on User Dashboard
   So that user can directly create a new ticket in the active milestone or edit an existing ticket assigned to him.
8. Enhanced UI for adding roles and permissions. 

What is a Component & how to use it effectively?

Component is a very useful feature in BootStrapToday tickets. It can help you automate some common workflow tasks. However, many teams have doubts/questions about how to use components effectively. In this post, I am going to take an example of small development team, (6 developers, 3 QA and a project manager) and explain how to use components.

Let’s assume that this small development team is ‘BootStrapToday development team’. BootStrapToday has many features, account, projects, tickets, wiki, wall , timesheet, milestone, etc etc. Obviously all developers are not going to work on all features. Typically, one developer (let’s call him ‘Nitin’) will look after tickets, milestones, other developer will look after account, project, users, roles & permissions etc (let’s call him Vishwajeet), some other developer will work on Wall, Timesheet ,etc (let’s call him Anand).  At the same time, while all QA engineers are not going to test every feature. Usually, one QA engineer will work with two developers and test features/bug fixes implemented by them. Let’s assume one QA engineer looks after tickets, milestone, wall, timesheet etc (lets call him Ajit). Other QA engineer account, project, users, role & permission etc (let’s call her Vaishali).

In a typical day, Ajit is testing milestone and discovers a bug that milestone due date is not getting updated correctly. He will open a Bug ticket and assign it to Nitin. Nitin will get a notification mail that a bug is assigned to him. He will work on the bug and fix it. Nitin will then change the status of the ticket to ‘resolved’ and assign the ticket to Ajit for testing. Ajit will then test and confirm that bug is fixed and he will resolve this ticket.

However, this typical workflow has some shortcomings.

1. What if Ajit reports a bug forgets to ‘assign’ it to appropriate developer? Suppose a new QA engineer has joined and he is not sure which developer is working on which feature groups ?
2. What if Nitin changed the bug status but forgot to assign it to Ajit for testing. In this case, Ajit is not aware that the bug is fixed and hence it may not get tested on time !!
3. What if project manager wants to know how many bugs were reported for Ticket, for Wall, for role & permissions etc. ? Or he needs some charts for bug distribution by feature groups (components)? There is no quick way to filter tickets by feature groups.

Component feature of BootStrapToday (or Feature Group) addresses these shortcomings. Now let’s consider a new workflow using the ‘Component’.  First Anand (the project manager) has to configure some project settings.

1. Project Manager (Anand) creates a new project called ‘BootStrapToday’.
2. He then adds users Nitin, Vishwajeet, Vaishali and Ajit. Nitin, Vishwajeet and Anand are assigned ‘developer’ role. Vaishali and Ajit are assigned QA engineer role.
3. Anand then goes to Project Settings page and start creating various components (or feature groups or modules). The team has decided to implement account, project and Tickets and milestone first. So Anand creates 4 components  ‘account’, ’project’ and ‘Ticket’ and ‘milestone’.
4. Each component has an ‘implementation owner‘ and ‘verification owner’. ‘Implementation owner’ is the person responsible for implementing or executing the feature and also responsible for any bugs reported. If there is a team of 4 developers working on feature, then the team lead will be implementation owner. Similarly ‘Verification owner’ is the person responsible for checking and verifying that implementation is correct/as per spec. If there is QA team working on one feature group. Then the QA team lead will be ‘verification owner’.
5. Anand decides that Vishwajeet will implement and maintain Account and Project while Nitin will implement Tickets and Milestones. Hence he assigns Nitin as ‘implementation owner’ for Ticket & milestone and similarly Vishwajeet for Account and Project.
6. Anand then decides that Vaishali will responsible for testing Account and Project and Ajit will be responsible for testing Ticket and milestones. Hence he assigns Vaishali as ‘verification’ owner for Account and Project and assigns Ajit as ‘verification owner’ of Ticket and milestone.

Now team starts the development. And Vaishali reports a crash bug during project creation.

1. She adds the bug, set the priority to ‘blocker’ and then set the component to ‘Account’.  And then submits the ticket.  On server, the BootStrapToday will check that the ticket is not assigned to anyone, however ticket has a component and Nitin is the Implementation owner. BootStrapToday server will then automatically assign the ticket to ‘Nitin’.
2. Nitin logs in and see the ‘Newly assigned’ ticket in ‘Needs your attention’ section on the user dashboard. He sees that its blocker crash bug. He immediately starts working on it.
3. To track the time spent on fixing this bug, Nitin starts the timer on the bug. Since the bug is in ‘open’ state the moment timer is started on the bug, the bug status changes to ‘in progress’. This way Anand (project manager) knows the Nitin has started the work on the crash.
4. Nitin fixes the crash and commits the code changes. Nitin then changes the status of bug to ‘resolved’ and submits the new status. The BootStrapToday server will see the Ticket is assigned to Nitin and Nitin has resolved it, the server will then look at the ‘verification owner’ of ‘account component’ and assign the ticket to verification owner. This ticket is now assigned to Vaishali for testing/verification.

The new workflow is now easier. If tomorrow Vishwajeet becomes the implementation owner for ‘Account’ then Anand just has to change the project settings. New tickets for ‘Account’ component will now be automatically get assigned to Vishwajeet.

Anand can easily filter tickets by component and see how many are open and reschedule them, change the priority etc using Quick Edit.

Hope this will convince you to define some components in your projects.  🙂

Enhancement in BootStrapToday Release 2.0

Following are some of the new enhancements in this Release

1) GIT support has been added.

Every Project you create in BootStrapToday has its own repository. So now while creating a new Project you can choose between SVN and GIT.

2) Login Page redesigned.

We felt the need to redesign the login page as per the design of the application, so we have pushed that as well in this release.

3) Ticket delete

Ticket delete feature has been added. This action will be available only to Project Manager.

4) Quick Ticket Edit

We had added “Quick Create” in the last release and in this we have also added “Quick Edit” functionality. This will be available in both Ticket list view as well as Milestone detail view. Now user can quickly edit multiple tickets from the same view without going through the different screens.

Enhancement in BootStrapToday Release 1.9

Following are the updates in Release 1.9

1) Ticket Notifications:

Notification mail will be sent to user assigned to ticket when ticket is created or when ticket assignment is changed.

Other notifications like comment added etc will be added in next release.

2) “Quick Create” feature for tickets on Ticket list and milestone detail.

“Quick create” feature has been added on ticket list and milestone detail page to quickly create tickets without leaving the page.

3) File Share

“File Share” feature has been added in this release to upload and share files & documents with your teammates.

4) Delete User

Delete user functionality has been added in this release. Now you will be able to delete users if you no longer want user to be part of the account.

5) Project Type and Technology

Project Type and Technology has been added on the project. Now Non-IT project will not be seeing source browser inside projects. Source Browser will be applicable only for IT projects.

Also, soon we will be adding “In the lab” section which will keep our customer posted on what are the features we are working on, for future releases.

Enhancement in BootStrapToday Release 1.7

Following are updates in BootStrapToday Release 1.7 (29th Jan, 2011)

1) There has been significant improvement in the performance.

2) New features to quickly add & edit multiple tickets has been added.

• Save & Add Next: This will allow user to quickly add multiple new tickets with minimum number of clicks.
• Save & Edit Next: This will allow user to quickly edit multiple tickets with minimum number of clicks.

3) IP Filter at User level added.

Earlier Account admin could define IP Filter at Account level. Now we have added functionality to add IP Filter at User level as well. User Level IP Filter will override account level settings if defined. If somebody is traveling and he needs access from anywhere, for that he can be given “Access from anywhere”.

4) “Need Your Attention” Section on User Dashboard added.

This section will show all the tickets which are assigned to you and had any activity since last login.

5) Component Workflow added.

Now you can define components and component owners and related workflow with each component.

Components can be assigned to the tickets now. Once defined Tickets will follow the assigned component workflow.

6) Ticket filter improved.

• Multiple select on each field for filtering added.
• You can search for tickets with empty attributes now.

7) Activity is now clubbed by date.

8 ) Active flag added on milestone.

• Now you can set your active milestones (Milestones on which you are working currently).
• Feature to move all the “open” Tickets to next milestone if active milestone expires, has been added.

9) And lots of bugs from last release have been fixed.