#pivotaltracker

This is great! Less switching back and forth.

What do we do when we have a set of things to do and we are looking for the momentum to get them started and completed on time?  If we are being Agile, we may have made an estimate as to how long these user stories will take to complete. It’s likely that we are enthusiastic about some tasks and less excited about others. We may order the stories by which would be the easiest to complete, or if we’re working with a sensitive timeline, which tasks will take the least amount of time to deliver. Even the most well thought plans yield to natural entropy. We miscalculate estimates, we overlook details, it happens, that's life, we address the issues and continue to iterate.  Here at Elevator Up, we have been practicing a new technique to further combat the ever present issue of inaccuracy through a technique we call, emotional mapping.

A WAY THROUGH THE PROBLEM

Emotional mapping is a metric that provides us with another dimension to measure success, adjust predictions, and delegate work. If you are familiar with Agile development you know that a large part of determining the success of a project is your ability to make accurate estimates. Here at Elevator Up we use an app called Pivotal Tracker to sort our stories. Pivotal tracker employs the use of a point based estimate system. In this example, one point represents an hour of effort.

Luckily for us, pivotal tracker recently introduced the use of emojis throughout the app. We can use this feature as a label to then add an appropriate emoji that represents how the assignee’s feel about the story as a whole.

We can then freely add these labels to our set of stories and start to get a sense of the emotional content of the work ahead.

Like all good science, emotional mapping requires honesty in order to yield true results. It’s best for the individuals in which the stories are assigned to label feelings, as with time, as fair estimates that consider variance between people and organizations. What troubles me, might excite you, what takes long for me, might be quick for you.

DETECTING AND MANAGING PATTERNS

If we track the emotional content honestly we may grow a better sense of not only how long stories take to complete, but who are the best individuals to assign the work. We may notice stories mapped the same way by different people and we may be able to suggest that they might collaborate well if they were assigned a similar story together. In contrast, we may also start to see which types of tasks are known favorites or nefarious undertakings.

The possibilities of deducing meaning are broad but some of the more obvious observations tell us that tasks people don’t like to do, tend to take longer, and that is completely fair. This suggests that we should seek to balance this insight as much as any other.

We’ve found that doing a fun task before a less emotionally engaging task within the same span of effort tends to lower the overall time it takes to complete both. Finding balance is key, emotional mapping gives us a system through which we can further refine our various workloads.

HAVE FUN

We think that people should do things they like to do. Emotional mapping is a seamlessly integrated metric that helps you and your team optimize your work strategies. Have fun with it! 😜

Developerの平形です。

初めての投稿になります。 興奮して書かずにはいられませんでしたw

なにかというと、

GitHub issueをかんばんボードに表示してくれるZenHubというサービスの事です。

※ GitHub IssueはGitHubの課題管理の機能です。 ※ GitHubはオープンソースコミュニティの世界的中心となる存在で現代のITエンジニアリングはGitHubが支えていると言っても過言ではありません。 詳しくはwikiで

GitHub Issueで課題の優先順位を付けられず苛立ちを隠しきれないあなたの悩みはこれで解決できるのです。

ZenHubはこちら

Chromeの拡張として動作します。使ってみたらわかりますが、マジ神の領域です。

ZenHubの事は後でまた語ります。

一旦、

僕とGitHubが出会った頃に遡ってお話しします。 GitHubを知ったのは今から3年前くらいでした。 gitも触った事が無くてあまりお近づきになれない感じでモヤモヤしてたんですが、なんか開発者の間で流行ってるなー。って感じで遠くから眺めてる感じでした。 「よくわかんないけど、なんかgitってカッコよさそう」と思ってましたw

それで、とりあえず社内のこれから始まるプロジェクト(Goalousゴーラス)でGitHub使ってみようと思ったのです。それが約１年半前くらいです。

gitは最初はなかなか思い通りにいかず苦労しましたが、噛めば噛む程味が出るスルメのようなもので、使っていくうちに完全に虜になりました。

それでバージョン管理としてはgitは最強だと知りました。さらにGitHubを使ってGUIでコミットのdiffとか見れてべんり〜。って感じでした。

プロジェクトのソース管理はGitHubで確定しました。 で、GitHubは課題管理機能もあるじゃん！と、いうことで課題管理もGitHubでやっていこうとしたんですが、GitHub Issueは課題管理としては機能が全然弱くて、redmineとかbacklogとかのほうがまだ全然いいじゃん！って感じでした。

プロジェクトはアジャイルに進めたかったんです。なんか「かんばん、かんばん」って流行っててポストイットがホワイトボードに張られている写真をwebのページで見る機会が多くなり、影響されました。それwebのツールで無いのかなぁと思い、アジャイルに強いプロジェクト管理ツールを探していたらカンバンボードをオシャレに表示できるPivotal Trackerを見つけて、「これだ！」と思いました。様々なクラウドツールと連携できるし、GitHubとの相性も悪くありませんでした。

かなり良い開発フローで運用ができて満足していました。

しかし、その後GitHubのPull Requestがマジで便利な事に気づいたんです。 Pull RequestでコードレビューしてGitHub上で行にコメント入れてやり取りするのがすごく便利です。これはもの凄く使えるぞ！とワクワクしました。

あと、ちゃんとテストしようと思いTravisとかCoverallsとか導入していったんですが、こいつらもヤバいです。テストの結果とカバレッジの結果をコミット単位でGitHubに返してくれるのでGitHubだけ見ていれば結果がわかって超便利で使いやすいです。 これらとプルリク組み合わせれば最強だ！

そうこうしているうちに気付いちゃったんです。

「GitHubに全ての情報を集めるべきだ！」と。

もちろん課題も。

という事で長い間愛していたPivotal Trackerさんと涙の別れをし、GitHub issueちゃんとお付き合いする事にしたのです。

しかし、issueの優先順位を付けられない事が結構辛かったんです。最初は我慢して使っていましたが、どうしてもPivotal Trackerのようなドラッグアンドドロップでスムーズで直感的なUIが愛おしくなり、Pivotal Trackerさんと復縁しようか悩んでおりました。

「GitHub issueをどうにかしてカンバンボードのように表示する事はできないのか！」

「Pivotal TrackerのIceboxとかBacklogみたいなのとか無くてもいいから、せめて課題の優先順位くらい付けさせてくれ！」

と思ってググったら、速攻で見つかりました！

ZenHub

一瞬で惚れました。 優先順位どころかIcebox、Backlogもちゃんとあります！

しかもZenHubを紹介している日本語の記事が全く無い！

という事で「俺が書くしか無いやろー」と思い、今興奮しながら書いている訳です。

ここからが本題です。（前置き長過ぎてすみませんw）

まずZenHubの何が良いのかというと、GitHubの全ての機能はそのままで、カンバンボードにissueを表示してくれるんです。しかもドラッグアンドドロップで自由にカードを配置できます。

chromeの拡張なのでインストールも楽です。

あと、issue、commit単位で投票できるようになってるし。

ほんとに夢のような体験です。issue全体をサクっと捉えられてマジ気持ちいいです。

現在パブリックベータ版ですが、僕はこれお金払っても使い続けたいです。

まずはZenHubを試してみてはいかがでしょうか？

みんなgithub issueに同じ悩み抱えてないのかなー？ いや、あるでしょう！

まぁ今日はこの辺にしておきます。

それではまたお会いしましょう。

ごきげんよう。さようなら。

We just rolled out a new version of Hojoki, complete with lots of new features. We’ve decided that from now on, we’ll inform you of what we accomplish with each update. This way, you’ll know what we’ve been up to. You’re always welcome to comment here and suggest new features, or give us your feedback on the update!

So, this time we did the following:

New Arrival: CloudApp

And now let’s welcome our new arrival. After being tested by some of you, we’re now enabling CloudApp integration for all our users. We like CloudApp a lot. It’s an easy, fast and fits in very well with our current tool set. If you want to share something quickly with a sharable link, just use this fantastic, free app. After adding it to Hojoki, it will show up in your stream where you can share it with Hojoki projects with one click. We provide a preview in Hojoki for images and which opens up inside a shiny box.

Improvements: Pivotal Tracker and Github

Some of you suggested to support authentication via API key for Pivotal Tracker. We liked it lot, took a look at it and decided to fit it into this release. 

Further, we improved the Github integration. Hojoki now shows you organizational repositories in addition to personal ones. A known issue here is that, at the moment, private repos don’t show up. We are in contact with Github, as the issue seems to be on their side. However, we didn’t want to delay the update and force you to wait while this was being figured out. We will tell you as soon as this has been solved.

New Users

We saw that some of you had some questions about your first steps with Hojoki. We put a lot of effort into improving the existing user flow and designing some additional features. We’ve taken our first step towards that in this update, we’ve improved the welcome screen for new users. At the same time, the flow for connecting new apps has gotten easier and smoother.

Back-end and Bugs

User numbers are rising and you guys have been connecting lots of apps to Hojoki, which is great. Some of you reported edge cases and ran into bugs that needed fixing. We also had some stability issues in the back-end. We fixed 30+ of such tickets!!! 

What Comes Next

One update down, onto the next one. We will start testing Evernote integration with some of you (interested? write to [email protected]) very soon. Zendesk and Lighthouse are in the making. On the front-end side, we will add a “Welcome Project” to show some initial help content for new users and a “First steps” area explaining what to do next (“Create a project”, “Invite some people”...). And finally, the work on the back-end will go on, especially addressing our client/server communications. This will help all of you who are running into problems with our iPad version. We know about the issues and are going to fix them!

We’ve just added Pivotal Tracker to our alpha version of Hojoki. You can now shoot some hoops with the app that is also our first choice for development tasks. You’ll get notified in Hojoki whenever you or a collaborator alter anything in Pivotal Tracker. Pivotal Tracker fits nicely into our existing tool-set, as it supports apps like Twitter, Github (coming soon to Hojoki), Lighthouse (coming soon to Hojoki) and Zendesk (coming soon to Hojoki).

Hojoki looks for new activities in your Pivotal Tracker account. It imports activities when a task is created, edited (e.g. change wording, add tags), started, finished and deleted. Hojoki also imports associated people and provides you with powerful faceted filtering for who created a task, who requested it and who is responsible for doing it. This way you could easily find out which of the tasks you are responsible for have been requested by Tom.

So, that’s one more app added to the already large selection. We aim to maintain this pace and continue to roll out all your favourite apps. Remember, we base future additions to Hojoki on your suggestions. Visit our feature request forum and tell us what you’d love to see in Hojoki.

Here’s a guide on how to get started with Pivotal Tracker in Hojoki. 

By Adam Bannister

Previous blogs of a similar nature:

Hojoki Plays Nicely With Beanstalk