Today's a great day - we just
launched our 3rd customer release this year. After going 1.0 in January, we've followed up with some considerable new features and capabilities. Releasing on this kind of schedule is exciting - customers notice, the business notices and the reputation building helps in planning. Trust is one of the critical components in building software - regular releases and delivering on promises goes a long way in building that trust. I'm proud of the entire team - there's nothing like seeing ideas delivered.
The biggest item on my wishlist right now resides around development feature tracking.
- I wish I could have every team (specs, development, application qa, data qa, ops) pulling work items from the same place.
- Login would dictate the view you see (my items + open items for my workarea).
- Items would be automatically released into the work areas when there are no dependencies on an item (gating).
- The UI would color code items and auto sort by timeliness and priority. Color coding based on green/yellow/red where green is on-schedule, yellow is within a % timewindow of completion date minus estimated days and red when it falls below the timewindow.
- A universal client that runs as a browser-based tool or single-click download.
- Integrates with Outlook and Project (like Team System)
- Doesn't cost an arm and a leg (it's only worth an arm to me).
A simple idea on
how this works is that when a developer marks an item complete and the item gets released to QA in the subsequent build, those items should appear on QA's screens. Some items may require application QA to address it prior to data QA while other items may be released to each QA group simultaneously. The software should handle these gating functions automatically without any admin intervention.