Tools
Project dashboard
- For each of our active projects, we create an online project dashboard
- Everyone involved can get a live update of the project as we work on it – from meeting notes to design changes and feedback.
- We like to put everything there- from documents and ideas, to visual designs and interactive prototypes. This cuts down on emails, and makes it very easy to see what’s going on.
- The actual dashboard is a Wiki, which means that everyone is able to contribute information and collaborate in a very rabid rapid fashion.
- We use some software called Confluence to run this
You can read more about our wiki ways here: How we Wiki
Issue tracking
- Issue tracking is something that every company seems to do differently – sometimes an excel spreadsheet is enough, other people use bug tracking software.
- We think that keeping track of various tasks, requests, and problems that pop up is pretty important, so we use Jira for issue tracking. Jira keeps track of all the nuts and bolt details that are involved with delivering an interactive project.
- Tasks get assigned to people, and you can log in to see who is working on what, and when things get resolved.
- Depending on the type of issue, it will go through a particular workflow process. So simple things get entered and then checked off, while more complex issues will get checked and verified before they’re complete.
- Working this way allows us great transparency – you can see who was working on a particular task, when it was resolved, and the resolution.
Version control
- In the same way Word’s “track changes” feature is useful when working in a group, version control tools are vital for our web projects.
- Our tools keep everything flowing smoothly; automatically storing versions of files as they get saved, and merging changes if two people work on the same thing.
- Once we’re ready to publish, we press the magic button and the right bits are pulled together and delivered to the server.
- Some of our projects involve working with other teams. We might do do one part of a site, and another team is building a shopping module that needs to use some of our work. By using version control, we can easily work together on the same code
We use Subversion, and Warehouse to manage and browse this information. And we use Capistrano to run the publishing process, fill out our timesheets and to make coffees for everyone.