Priorities in Lighthouse and new faces
Over the past week we’ve been implementing basic priorities in Lighthouse—a highly requested feature. In addition to that, we’ve got a new face around the dojo that will be helping us out with customer support and the Active Reload community.
Priorities in Lighthouse
When we started discussing how we would implement priorities in Lighthouse, one thing we knew we didn’t want to do was implement the traditional system of an all encompassing group of keywords that specified project-wide priorities (high, urgent, blocker, low, etc). We believe this type of system is fundamentally flawed.
Do it now or do it later
A ticket is either important–meaning you should do it ASAP, or it’s not important–you can do it later. For example, the words “urgent”, “high”, and “blocker” invoke the same emotional response. These are the types of tickets that need to be completed as soon as you’re able to do so. Tickets marked as “normal” and “low” are tickets you feel you can do later, after you’ve completed your important tickets.
Milestones establish a priority context
If you have two milestones: “First Release” and “Second Release”, you’ve already setup a priority system. It’s obvious that the “First Release” milestone should be completed first, and all tickets within that milestone take priority over those in the “Second Release” milestone.
Exclusive priorities
What happens when you have a ticket that is important for your Designer but has no bearing on your HR department? In traditional systems, it’s either all or nothing. You’d mark the ticket as important and everybody would see it as so. We’ve taken the approach that allow different priorities per person. A ticket can be important for person a, but has no bearing on person b.
Start using priorities!
Once a ticket is given a milestone, you can assign it a priority. To get to the prioritize area, just click on a Milestone name in your project and you’ll be ready to get started with priorities.
Welcome a new face
We’d like to introduce Will Duncan. Will will be helping us around the forums, with email, and on our bug tracker. He might also be blogging a bit when he gets in the groove. Will has been a long time community evangelist and support ninja for the very successful photo blog software Pixelpost. He’s not to shabby at photography either if I might say so. Welcome aboard Will!
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Active Reload is a small company founded by Rick Olson and Justin Palmer. Rick is a member of the Ruby on Rails core team, while Justin is a member of the Prototype Javascript Library core team. Together we build rocking software with a focus on awesomeness.
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May29permalink
Read your tweets for messages prefixed with @foo and post to that user. http://pastie.caboo.se/65927
# Read tyler-durden's tweets for any messages starting with '@project-mayhem' # # $ ruby twitter_bot.rb tyler-durden project-mayhem my-password # # Stores the last modified and highest id in a yaml file in the pwd by the anme of 'twitter_bot.cache' # Should block against dupes and be easy against twitter's servers -
May17permalink
Displaying nice relative dates
<%= relative_time(Time.now) %> # today <%= relative_time(1.day.ago) %> # yesterday <%= relative_time(1.day.from_now) %> # tomorrow <%= relative_time_span([Time.now, 5.days.from_now]) %> # May 17th - 22nd -
May16permalink
Rick: no more lightbox? Justin: no, I banished it because it was useless the way it was being used. Rick: ha, it was cool man Justin: yeah, Zune music sharing is cool too. Rick: touche -
May10
Scrobbler: Last.fm for Ruby —Ruby Library for accessing the AudioScrobbler web service.
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Discussion
Hi guys.
Why is it seemingly impossible in Lighthouse to see a list of ALL of your open tickets, regardless of project?
Currently my beef with using Lighthouse is ticket accountability. By accountability I mean people with tickets assigned to them periodically being accountable for them. This is tough to do when I’ve got people working on multiple projects simultaneously and with tickets open across all of them.
Did you consider making this possible (views of tickets by status and/or personal priority, regardless of project)?
@Bosko
Searching across multiple projects is indeed a concern that lighthouse users have brought up recently as their accounts become more populated. I recall Rick discussing how this might take place in the future.
You can list ALL open tickets within one project, I use the ticket bin system to handle my different searches within my projects. But not within every project at once.
As far as personal priority goes, the tagging system is the most flexible way to handle keeping that organized. Tags are very powerful asset to complex workflow and organization, making them more than just a single search description key word for whatever reason.
Again, you are sheltered within one project for this. My projects have nothing to do with each other, so this has never effected me directly, or a lot of people for that matter. But I do see a case where projects are related through different clients, and you have a mass team sifting through all of them. Some prefer to keep them separate so it’s a very divided workflow and others wish to be able to sift through the mass search of all projects when they hunt for tags (or at least have an option for that). Between the feeds and email system I haven’t personally run into brick walls with organization and my teams, but I definitely do see your point.