Unfuddle has been Unfuddled

Apr 8, 2007 Unfuddle

As many of you know, we have been working tirelessly to bring you our first major release since the launch of Unfuddle. While we have been quiet, we have been taking months of feedback and integrating your ideas in such a way as to keep Unfuddle as simple and as elegant as it has been since its launch.

Here is a brief overview of the biggest changes. We know you will like them!

Multiple Projects per Account

Since the launch of Unfuddle, there has been one feature request that has dominated the feedback scene: the ability to have multiple projects within a single Unfuddle account. Well, we have heard you and are very proud to say that all Unfuddle accounts now support multiple projects. The number of projects you and your team can manage is dependent upon your current plan.

This means one set of users across all of your projects, one unified login, and more bang for your buck!

Tickets, Tickets, Tickets

Chances are, if you are a developer, you live in the tickets. With the new update, there are a number of changes to the ticketing system.

First off is the ability to create custom ticket reports. We have created a stock set of reports for all existing projects, but these reports can easily be changed to group, sort and find whatever your little heart desires. You wanted flexible reporting and here it is.

Next is an improved ticket workflow. One of the weaknesses of Unfuddle up until now has been the inability to verify that a closed ticket has, in fact, been fixed. This was especially difficult for larger teams. Now, when a developer closes a ticket, it is immediately reassigned to the reporter who can then verify and close the ticket. Also, it is very easy to see where a ticket is in its lifecycle as we have added a nifty visual timeline to all tickets.

Up until now, while it has certainly been helpful to assign a milestone and priority to a ticket, it was still difficult to manage resources and critical paths. To remedy this, all tickets can now have an optional due date. This additional field allows a very basic, yet flexible mechanism for managing what really needs to be done next.

For those of you who are in to the time tracking features of Unfuddle, we have added a few features that will really help. All tickets now have both initial and current estimates of hours required. Obviously, we have improved reporting to coincide with this new information. Want to know how close we really are to finishing the Beta Milestone? Now it’s a breeze.

Note that with the new time tracking updates that your project and milestone status bars may show different percentages. Previously, percentage complete was calculated using the number of tickets. It is now calculated using the hours invested vs. current estimate.

Email Notifications

One of the weaker areas of Unfuddle to date has been the notification system. Well, email notifications are now vastly improved sporting more intuitive formatting, and more event detail. This includes notifications of ticket assignment. Now you can know immediately when tickets are assigned to you.

Email notifications are now also subject to your notification preferences (found in Personal Settings). You can opt to receive notification of only certain events. With regards to tickets specifically, you can even opt to receive notifications for only the tickets with with you are involved or have deliberately chosen to monitor.

All notifications are now being sent in an HTML and plain text multipart email. This means that if you are using a mail client that supports HTML, you will receive an email that is much easier on the eyes than the previous notifications. Of course, if you are a plain text junkie, then you will still have the same new and improved information and format in your plain text version.

Miscellaneous

Along with an absolute slew of minor bug fixes and cosmetic updates, there were a couple of small changes that are worth noting.

The first change is the ability to archive milestones. Many of you have found that after a few months into your project, your milestone list can become unwieldy, especially in dropdowns. Now, you can easily archive those older, completed milestones so they don’t clutter up your screen.

The second change is a slightly more robust markup that allows you to reference tickets, changesets, and source files. This markup can be used anywhere in Unfuddle, even in Subversion commit messages. Some examples of the new markup include:

• Tickets: “Fixed ticket:322” or “Fixed #322”
• Revisions: “Bug was fixed in revision:2185” or “Bug was fixed in [2185]”
• Source: “The best version of the algorithm was in source:/trunk/message.rb@183”

Infrastructure Upgrades

As Unfuddle has grown so have our physical hardware needs. Many of you will find Unfuddle to be quite a bit faster as we have upgraded all of our servers to brand new, top-of-the-line machines. Thanks to the great folks at Rackspace for making this part of our lives so easy.

Along with the server upgrades, there were also a number of software updates. One of the more notable changes to the upgrade from Subversion 1.3 to 1.4. This update will not change how anyone interacts with their existing repositories. However, this change does open some exciting doors for the future, such as leveraging the repository syncing features of Subversion 1.4.