If you use the “component” field within Assembla’s Tickets Tool, this post is for you. The component field has been removed as a default ticket field. If your project used the component field, don’t worry, we have maintained this field within your project as a “custom field” that's still available on all tickets. New projects created will no longer have the component field by default, but if you miss it, you can easily create it as a custom field. We encourage new users try the recently released tags for tickets feature thats provides similar functionality with enhanced filtering options.

So how does this affect you?

The default "Active by Component" and "Closed by Component" filters are no longer available. If you or your team used these filters, you can easily bring them back by creating a custom filter, grouped by component:

• From the ticket list view, click on “Filter” in the upper left to expose the report builder.

• Set “Sorting and Grouping” to group by component and set to only show tickets that are open. This will create a report similar to the previous “Active by Component.”

• When you are done building the desired report, scroll to the bottom, name it, and save it. You can “Share with team” where all team members have access to this report in the “Team Filters” section of the filter dropdown.

Now that the component field is a custom field, instead of an Assembla default, you can edit the properties or remove it by going to your Ticket Tool > Settings subtab > Ticket Fields section.

Ticket Tool Tip:

Did you know you can change the default filters and views (Ticket List, Cardwall, and Planner) from the Settings tab of your Ticket Tool? This saves time by immediately placing team members on the most used filter and view when they login to your Assembla project.

When people think about continuous delivery, they think about speed.  They want faster delivery of high priority requests, from idea to release.  However, we found that we use the capacity that we get from continuous delivery to reduce stress, rather than increase speed.

I think that the stress reduction comes from three sources:

1) Things get fixed faster.  Problems don’t have time to build up.  If you have to wait many weeks to get a fix for a problem, stress builds up in that time.  Everyone affected by the problem is working around it and asking questions and applying pressure.  It feels better to just deploy small fixes and improvements can get deployed quickly.

2) Complicated work can take longer.  Everything gets finished on its own schedule, so you can take a long time to finish and test something complicated.  You don’t have the added stress of trying to fit it into a particular release.  You can use the extra time to improve quality and confidence.

3) Less work.  You can remove some batch planning work, including iteration planning, release planning, and status reporting.

How do you see the forest but keep teams focused on their own trees? With Space Manager.

Assembla recently introduced the Space Manager feature to help service providers and companies with large projects handle two use cases:

• Many client projects being serviced by one or a small number of development teams.

• One complex project being developed by several development teams.

Space Manager, along with the new Tag feature, can help these companies manage their backlog better, let teams focus on their own work, and give clients and customers a restricted view of their own ticket lists but nobody else’s. It helps managers manage the “big picture” while making teams more efficient.

Use Case #1: Many projects served by one team

What if you are a service provider or custom development firm creating software apps for multiple clients? Or part of a corporate web site or application group serving multiple internal customers?

Then you want to maintain a master backlog of tasks, but also keep track of which tasks belong to which clients. You may also want to let your clients submit requests directly to the master backlog, and later view the progress of those tickets, but not be able to see tickets submitted by anyone else.

With Space Manager, you can set up a “Master Space” for the entire development team, then a series of “Child Spaces,” one for each client. The process will then work as shown in the diagram below.

How do you plan, manage and close Scrum sprints with Assembla?

Stabilize a Scrumban iteration? (And what is "Scrumban"?)

Manage the tasks in a Kanban or lean Continuous Delivery process?

Assembla has very flexible tools for managing Agile (and non-Agile) development processes. So flexible, that it's not always obvious how to manage tasks for a specific Agile methodology.

That's why we have created three online tutorials that walk you through how to manage Scrum, Scrumban and Kanban processes using Assembla's new Renzoku feature set.

You can find the tutorials here:

How to Manage Scrum with Assembla

How to Manage Scrumban with Assembla

How to Manage Kanban/Continuous with Assembla

By the way, Scrumban uses periodic releases, like Scrum, but adopts some lean practices from Kanban. Read about it here.

Michael posted last week about A Developer Dashboard for All Your Tools.   He showed how you can use custom tabs to display external Web pages in your Assembla space.  This is a cheap trick with powerful effects on focusing attention. In this article we will explain how to set up a custom tab.

Setup

Go to your Admin tab and select "Tools".  You will find the following panel:

Click on the button to add a new tab to the top of your space.  Select the new tab.  You will see a form where you can configure it.

Now, sort your tab into the position that you want.  You can go back to the Admin tab and select Appearance.  You will see a Navigation panel where you can drag your tabs into the order you want.

Examples

I get a management report with key financial numbers on a Google spreadsheet. After moving it to a custom tab, I look at it more frequently.

As you can see below, we put Jenkins in a custom tab, and we used our Jenkins oAuth plugin to log viewers into Jenkins with their Assembla accounts.

We keep a lot of monitoring tools in our tab bar:

I just finished up a webinar entitled Production Monitoring: The Key Steps Towards Continuous Delivery, presented with Airbrake.io The webinar focused on how Production Monitoring is the most important process in any application, but particularly online applications when practicing Continuous Delivery.

 

The Key Points were:

• Continuous Delivery is not a process that I can define for you, rather its a goal.
• The Goal of being able to continuously deliver your code to QA/UAT or Production and react in real time to the results of the release.
• Iteration Planning is Stressful
• Confidence in Releases is Key to Automating Deploys
• Confidence in Code is Key to Moving Fast
• More Data and Less Stress

If you missed the webinar, you can view it above or watch it on youtube and/or download the slides.

At the end of the webinar, I was left wondering: How does Assembla fit into the Continuous Delivery Pipeline? Stay tuned, more to come.

To Learn More about Continuous Delivery checkout some of my other blog postings:

Continuous Delivery vs Continuous Deployment vs Continuous Integration 

Distributed Continuous Integration - Keep the Mainline Clean 

Avoiding Premature Integration or: How we learned to stop worrying and ship software every day

You ever have those really good ideas, create a product or website around it, and no one cares?  That is what is happening with the Custom Tab at Assembla.  It’s about my favorite tool in the stack there, since I can use it to extend Assembla functionality and tools without doing anything.  

Our team used to have a bunch of tools all over the place, New Relic for monitoring our application, Nagios for monitoring our servers, Jenkins for our CI, Kibana for log aggregation, and even a custom application for showing off our Developer stats.  We had documentation to let everyone know where each tool was.  It was tedious and annoying to keep up to date and inform everyone where to go next.

Instead, I put them in Custom Tabs:

Now, when we add a new tool to our stack, its immediately available and visible for all our developers to use from within the Assembla project.

Ideally you are able to use authentication integration so that being logged into Assembla also has you logged into the other service or tool removing the need to double login, but typically this is not an issue as you would have to login again for another browser tab.

We also just added the favicon as default to Custom Tab tabs, I hope you enjoy this feature as much as me. To try this out yourself, visit the Admin tab of your project > click on Tools > and Add the Custom Tab Tool. 

To Check Out More Cool Features and Tools - www.assembla.com

 If you have more than 30 open tickets, you will need a good way to filter them by feature, team, or client.  You should use the new Tag feature.

Adding Tags

Now, you can enter tags on a Ticket.  As you add tags, you will build a tag cloud in your popup tag selector.

Using Tags

You can use these tags to see the tickets that you want to work with.

In the LIST view, you can quickly open the sidebar and select a tag.



On the CARDWALL, the tag selector makes it easy to see the current tasks for a team, feature, or client.

On the PLANNER, you can quickly select a tag (on top of the new column).  You will see backlog and current tickets that match that tag.  The shorter list will be much easier to sort, and your new tickets will automatically match your tag.  What happens if you sort the tickets in this filtered view?  We put a lot of work into an algorithm that we call “ladder sort” which keeps the same slots in the big list by swapping tickets in the filtered list.

Why use Tags?

You can tag and filter your tickets  with  a custom list field, or “component”.  Why use tags? 

* You  can add multiple tags tags to one ticket.  So, you can easily tag a ticket as being from Client A, for Feature team 1. In the old system, you would need to create two custom fields to do that, and you would need  to plan those categories in advance.

* Users can add new tags when they need them.  You want a limited number of tags so that the tag cloud will be readable, and so that you do not have to hunt through too many tags.  So, we give you the option of marking tags as “hidden” from the tag selector.  They are still available for the team members that need them.

* We are using tags as  quick filter on top of cardwall and planner.

Getting Started and Administration

You can add tags to tickets as you need them.  Then, you can start using the tags in the list filters, Planner, and Cardwall views.  After you have a coherent set of tickets for a client, project, or a team, you can make child project views in Space Manager.

Or, you can manage your tags to add better structure.  As a space owner, you can add and manage tags in the ticket settngs view.  You can “hide” tags that are not used very often, and keep your tag selector clean.  You can use batch update to apply tags to your existing tickets

Working with multiple teams on one big project

If you have a big project, you might have multiple teams, and when each team comes to the cardwall, they will want to select their view.  They will want their own default view.  They will also want to have discussions and share code reviews without seeing a lot of noise from other teams.  It’s not easy to manage a big project inside one Assembla space.  So, we just added a major new feature called “Space Manager”.  This feature allows you to create a child space, (like a subproject) where a team will see only a relevant set of tagged tickets.

When you create a child space in the Space Manager, you select the tag a tag for that child space.  It will show tickets with the related tag.  You can also create new tools, or share tools with the parent space.




Each team lead, works prioritizing their work in the child space view, while our VP and CTO work on the master space that holds all child space tickets.  This gives you a way to break out of one space and make your project much more expandable.

One team working with many clients or systems

Do you have one team or designer that is working on requests from multiple clients or projects?  In most agile planning systems, it is difficult to prioritize these requests.  You need separate collaboration spaces and separate planning sessions for each project.  What you want is a system that collects all of the requests in one place, so you can prioritize  them into one backlog. 

With Space Manager, you can create a child space for each client or project.  Then, invite the stakeholders to the child spaces.  They can add tickets and sort tickets and discuss tickets.  Those tickets will automatically be tagged with the selected client tag for that child space.  The client stakeholders will not see activity from all of the other clients or projects.  However, in the parent view, you

For maximum scalability, you can use both forms of organization at the same time.  You can take tickets from client spaces, and distribute them to team spaces.  If you have a Portfolio plan, you can create a child space for each of your clients. From the parent space, you can add a tag for the feature team that will work on that client request.



In this way, you and your client will be updated in one space, and the dev team can start to work on it right away in a different space.

Getting Space Manager

Want to try the new Space Manager for handling big backlogs from multiple teams or clients?  It is in the new Portfolio feature pack.  You can now add Assembla Portfolio to your subscription for a reasonable, fixed price. The user who is set as the Payer for your Assembla account can easily add the Portfolio Pack now in their Account page.

Integrated Git issue tracker

Forget about setting up a Git repository and an issue tracker locally only to have an integrated Git repository with a bug tracking system to run your software project.

With Assembla, you have an integrated system at your fingertips - just install a Tickets tool and a Git tool to your Space - that’s it, you are done setting up, let the work begin. Out of the box, you will be able to reference tickets from your commit messages - just write “re #1” in your commit message and a link to the commit will appear on ticket #1.

Even more integration?

Contiuous Delivery, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Delivery

That is all people are talking about these days. Well, me too. It's also what all the best development shops are moving to now. Well, me too.  

I participated in over a year long journey to bring Assembla into the Continuous Delivery world, and as any Continuous Delivery Afficionado would tell you, we continue to improve upon what we have learned.  After all, that is the basis of Continuous Delivery, improving upon what you learn in real-time.  As a matter of fact, it's the Key to Success with Continuous Delivery.

If I had to tell you one thing to do right now to start towards Continuous Delivery, it would be Production Monitoring. Useful for all systems, Production Monitoring is critical to your Continuous Delivery System, it allows you to react in real-time and gives you confidence to continue on.

Wednesday May 22: 1800 UTC, 1400 EDT, 1100 PDT

Assembla and Airbrake will present a Webinar: Production Monitoring: The Key Step Towards Continuous Delivery to help answer questions about Continuous Delivery and Production Monitoring.

In this webinar, we will discuss:

• What is Continuous Delivery, and how can it produce faster feature releases, improved quality and higher customer satisfaction?
• How do Continuous Delivery and production monitoring fit together?
• How can you collect and use error data and feedback effectively?
• Can Continuous Delivery with production monitoring actually decrease developers' stress levels and increase stability?

Register Now For Free 

 

To Learn more about Continuous Delivery, try these Blog Articles:

Continuous Delivery vs Continuous Deployment vs Continuous Integration - Wait huh? 

Which Git Workflow is Best? Mine of Course.