Introducing Unfuddle Alchemy
Since its launch over 6 years ago, Unfuddle has grown a lot. What started out as a personal project designed to meet a single team's needs, has grown to helping hundreds of thousands of users develop software better. While Unfuddle has gained many features and improved as a product over this time, our industry has matured and project management methodologies have continued to evolve.
It's time for Unfuddle to evolve as well.
In the past months, we have hinted that we have been busy. Actually, "busy" is an understatement. Our team has been taking its years of experience in software project management and has been applying it to the development of a completely new suite of software development tools. We call this suite Unfuddle Alchemy.
We have been using Unfuddle Alchemy internally for some time now and are really excited about how it has aided our development. But it is now nearing time to share with you all what we have been working on. To that end, we are starting an invitation-only beta of the tools in our new suite. We cannot include everyone in the beta right now, but we are so excited that we want to give you a sneak peak into what we have been working on behind the scenes.
Here are some hints: hierarchical objectives (replacing projects and tickets), sophisticated scheduling (including task boards), completely customizable workflows (custom states), live meetings, Mercurial, and much more.
If you are interested in receiving an invitation to the private beta of Unfuddle Alchemy, please sign up here. We cannot yet guarantee when you will receive an invite, but we will be sending out invitations over the coming weeks.
w00t!
This is great.
Fantastic!!! I can't wait!
That's great. I just hope you've resolved my main problem with Unfuddle: speed. Switching between tickets, changing the state of a ticket, listing tickets for a milestone, all these take 2 seconds or more.
The current state is little sluggish and gives pain and also lacks quick ticket searching. It will be better these things are rectified.
As Ned Baldessin said in this comments, you should be working on improving the actual Unfuddle, making it work faster and solving problems we already have, in my case i would never went to other solutions and i did because of the lack of solutions...
you should go that way since the Unfuddle Alchemy is not going the right way not in the design side and not even in usability, changing something like Unfuddle deserves some respect but we all do the same with our products, we think we own them but people owns a project once they use it, of course telling this to programmers or telling them what they did sucks is like telling a child is wrong.. an adult would think and react to make it better if it is intelligent, a child continues to do what is "exciting" for him, without listen others, that's the way children cross the street without watching...
i hope you spend time and money on solving the actual Unfuddle to avoid loosing customers
Oscar
Awesome! I have been trying to manage objectives for some time doing all sorts of things to get the site to better track it and it has not been the easiest thing to accomplish. I look forward to the new objectives tool. Hopefully it will eliminate the need for me to maintain several different reports and update them as the project changes. Can't wait!
-Ryan
Why would Unfuddle go to such lengths to make project management software, when the bug tracking software is hardly complete? Its basically a beta app. Not even considering the loss of service, crashes, broken features, or unpredictable yet consistently occuring downtime, the lack of features that every other bug tracking software has (and has had for years) makes Unfuddle an inferior product. Could you please complete and fix up the existing software before making any other half-brained apps?
Todd, Oscar and Ned nailed it.
All these years we've just assumed you had virtually no developers. Why else would you never fix the site's speed and usability? Now we find out you are doing development, but not on what your customers needed most...
In the meantime at my org we've built greasemonkey scripts to work around your javascript, and we've built numerous types of integrations with your API to be able to work with our tickets faster, to be able to track time, search faster, and do billing. All because switching ticketing systems is a huge pain and loss of money. But don't worry we will eventually switch.
Unfuddle is an essential part of our development process. I've seen that no new features have been added (or very small improvements) for a while. I think the actual product should be improved on the ability to generate easy reports on tickets. The information is there however it takes a lot of effort to generate common reports needed for status meetings.
I really would like to participate in the beta of the new product let see those new features!
I hope that the existing Unfuddle will continue to be offered once Unfuddle Alchemy is officially launched. It is meeting my needs pretty well, apart from the occasional brokenness/slowness that, frankly, happen so rarely I can live with it.
Looking at the new features offered by UA (the ones in your hints)... I just don't see anything in there that I would ever use.
We appreciate your feedback. Please see <a href='https://unfuddle.com/blog/2012/10/121012-realigning-priorities'>https://unfuddle.com/blog/2012/10/121012-realigning-priorities</a> for some clarification and an explanation of how we are addressing your concerns.
While you're working on the speed it would be great if you could make all links on the site use *actual HTML anchor tags* and put report filter criteria *in the URL*! I can't link to a report without saving it permanently and I can't save any report that sets a date range, and I can't click on a ticket from a report and then use the back button to get back to that report. Further, using a javascript click behavior instead of an HTML anchor link is maddening because I can't even preserve my report by opening the ticket in a new window. And I can't even write a greasemonkey script to fix it, the data isn't even in the DOM!
Unfuddle is already a superior tool for many project needs, I'm really excited to see the next generation of it.
- Aaron
I can't wait for the new product... in the meantime I'll just be sitting here waiting for my active tickets view to load...
Very interested in trying this out!
I'm only reading this blog post because I've been waiting for 5 minutes ticket search to complete. So I can't say I'm excited about the new tools considering they will probably rely on your existing infrastructure.
I recommend unfuddle to all my clients. The simplicity is what makes it shine. The email alerts on tickets and commits are such a great way to keep teams updated on the project and each persons contributions.
Two wishes.
1) change your login form so that browsers will offer to remember password
2) make it easier to get from the post-login screen to sub section of a project, such as
your projects:
project 1: dashboard / tickets / notebooks / repositories
project 2: dashboard / tickets / notebooks / repositories
project 3: dashboard / tickets / notebooks / repositories
15 minutes and you have some changes that people will appreciate every single day.
I have recently joined Unfuddle after reviewing and trying the other "players" in this market. I too am concerned about the proposed changes viz: "Here are some hints: hierarchical objectives (replacing projects and tickets), sophisticated scheduling (including task boards), completely customizable workflows (custom states), live meetings, Mercurial, and much more."
The appeal of unfuddle is its simplicity ... is their any market survey or customer input that tells you you need these things ?... or is it just the typical technicians wish to add features to be "better" than everyone else's product features. In particular your work flow is perfect ... and can be adapted to anyone's needs who understands "management by promises". There are many other ways of doing live meetings, why try and create yet another one? And so on.
Of course the product can be better, every software product can ... but perhaps your market is those, like us, who seek simplicity and clarity ... and that is the market you should enhance and protect?
Of course I wish you well, but please be careful not to screw up what you have.
I like the simplicity of current unfuddle services.
What I readlly would like: Nicer wiki! Nicer markup! To keep documentation clean and nice.
I really dont need any hierarchy now.
Only thing I need for my teams is peer-to-peer code reviews that would allow for some "Gating" into the master branch. Right now it offers a great thin layer on top of git but it would be nice to have this feature.