Things are moving pretty fast over here.  Busy day!

Quality Assurance (QA)

Mike & Joe spent the day doing a full QA on Build 639 so we can push the latest changes into the stable branch.  They found a couple minor things just by being incredibly comprehensive, but the fixes shouldn’t cause a significant delay.

Project Portal (JIRA)

Dan and I have spent part of the past couple work days cleaning up the project portal.  Today we vastly simplified the process of adding bugs and feature requests.  Most of the default fields that JIRA was prompting for weren’t actually used by our workflow.

We also removed the ‘priority’ field from public editing because it’s so arbitrary.  We replaced it with the 3-point agile priority system we use internally:

1. Must Have: Cerb4 is considered incomplete without this fix/request.  Most of the time we don’t use priority 1 for feature requests.  This helps ensure we’re tackling bugs before more glamorous and fun tasks writing new features.
2. Significant Value: These requests will bring more people to the project and will make the people who are already spending money with us even happier about their investment in our development.  We base a lot of ’significant value’ on what we’re hearing in feedback (and how often we’re hearing it).  We also factor in the votes.
3. Nice to Have: This is pretty much everything else.  Features in this category are done last — they aren’t holding anybody up and they won’t bring in significant new business.

Time Tracking

We’ve pulled together our dozens of notes on the “time tracking” feature requests and we’ve started development.

We have a new plugin for time tracking.  It currently adds a new tab to Display Ticket for keeping track of time slips related to specific tickets.  We have a global timer that floats in the top right of the application and counts up like a stopwatch.  You can play/pause/stop that timer.

It’s currently set up so you can start the timer as you view a new ticket.  Your time is then being logged as you read and reply to the message.  After you submit your reply, as usual, you’ll be able to stop the timer by clicking the “stop” button in the top right.  This will pop up a panel (like “peek” does everywhere) to allow you to enter comments about the time slip before it saves back to the ticket automatically.

We’ll allow time slips to be added to several objects, just like tasks work.  You’ll be able to do a quick report of all time slips over a date range.  You’ll be able to quickly mark whether an entry is billable or not.

There’s no guarantee that this won’t change significantly as development continues, but here’s a sneak peek: