The Devshop Blog

Case of the Disappearing Projects

For some time, the app was designed to automatically move any project that hit 100% complete into the Completed Projects section of the My Projects screen.

Completed projects then did not recalculate when changes to them were made.  This was a performance optimization.

Unfortunately, it seemed there were times when a project plan that was in development would hit 100% temporarily as you were building it.  Say for example, you had only milestones (no tasks) and all of them were in the past before you slid their dates forward...  (So their individual % complete values were each 100%) This project would get automatically moved into the Completed Projects bin and you wouldn't be able to move it back out because it would never recalculate again even if you made a change (like adding a new task at 0%) that should see the Project's % complete value be back to less than 100%!

The end result was projects seemingly unpredictably (if you didn't know what was going on behind the scenes) move into the Completed Projects bin.

Annoying!!

Anyway, FIXED!

Now, you explicitly mark a project as complete from the row menu of the project, in the My Projects screen.

IE8 now supported.

IE8 is now officially supported.

Admins Now See All

The default behavior of the app has been that if you're "on" a project (i.e. someone has added you to the team), you see that project, but if you're not, it doesn't show up in your list of projects.

This makes sense in most cases but was troublesome for admins, who needed to be explicitly added to each project so they could, well, "admin"!

Now, admins see all projects for that organization, regardless if they are explicitly on the team or not.

Go admins!

Print-friendly Schedules

By popular demand, there's now a print-friendly version of the Work Breakdown view, so you can share with clients, bring to meetings & make papier-mâché with!

You can access it here:

and it gives you:

Devshop is a finalist for Red Herring's Top 50 Canada!

Devshop was recently notified that we're in the running (top 100) for the Red Herring Top 50 Canada awards!

Devshop in ITWorld Canada

ITWorld Canada wrote a nice piece on Devshop's approach to "accounting for human messiness" ;). It's a good article, but for the record, I never said that people lie, cheat and are lazy ;).

Devshop v2 is out!

Devshop v2 went live a couple weeks ago. The upgrade went very smoothly - it took about 15 minutes. Gotta love hosted software.

This version was a major redesign of our user interface, based on our own learning of the past year and a lot of feedback from users. Navigation was simplified, and the risk metrics & reports that make Devshop special were made more obvious and clear.

I believe there is no other project management application out there that can touch it now, with respect to user interface. (But then again, I'm biased ;) ). And this is a front we're still improving over time.

We also added a few new features. Everyone with an account now has a personal profile that shows their team mates what they're working on, status, which projects, things that are ahead/behind, etc... We added an "editor" for schedule items that lets you copy and paste, import and export, and do bulk edits of task information as well as work offline - it's the "do everything" feature!

This version was a big "future proofing" exercise. We have a pretty clear idea of where we want the product to go and what major new advancements we'll be introducing over time. We wanted to make sure that this user interface was scalable and flexible such that as we develop these new features, we can just drop them in-place without having to redesign the user experience again. This will allow us to have a consistent user experience as we develop and also let us get new features out to you faster.

If you haven't seen it already, there's a 6 minute guided tour video here: www.devshop.com

Task Prioritization for Team Members

When you assign tasks to a team member, Devshop automatically schedules the team member's tasks one after another, with no overlap. This automatically prevents team members from being double booked inside a single project and makes creating a schedule much faster. It also prevents you from having to create manual dependencies to make tasks line up in the order you want them done. Rescheduling according to revised priorities is as simple as re-ordering the tasks for a team member and the schedule updates itself. Devshop even goes so far as to automatically build buffer time between tasks for observed Time Estimation Error and Distraction rates.

In most cases, this is just wonderful. However, in some cases, you want to manually schedule a team member's tasks. There is a new menu item in the row menu of a team member, on the Schedule screen, called "Prioritization". By default, the behavior of the application is exactly the same, because prioritization is turned on for every team member by default. However, now you can turn it off so that you can manually schedule team member tasks. In this way, Prioritization, on the Schedule screen, works exactly the same now as Sequencing (for Task Groups) on the Work Breakdown screen - that is, it takes whatever items are inside it and automatically lines them up for you, unless you turn it off.

This buys you a little extra freedom and a choice in scheduling behavior.

Devshop on Blip.TV

Today we created a channel on Blip.TV (http://devshop.blip.tv). Blip is great because it has all the built-in socially-goodness of any video sharing site, but it organizes things into channels, offers multiple viewing formats (QuickTime & Flash), RSS notifications and iTunes syndication.

We'll be sticking up all our tutorial videos and any new commercials we shoot, so feel free to have a look and subscribe so you'll know when new videos are available!

Devshop v2 has hit public beta!

Check out the beta version of v2! We'll be upgrading existing users over the next week or two...

Here's the link to create an account: Create a beta account for v2

There's also a 6 minute guided tour video here.

The theme for v2 was a dramatic step forward in user experience, as well as some new features like:

• import/export
• project quick start
• widgets for tasks (requirements, designs, notes, approval, etc.)
• performance enhancements
• personal profiles
• bulk item editor

and a pile of rough edges polished, based on user feedback over the year!