The Chronicles of Stuffed Guys

It was a long time since my last post about Factory Nova here. Now that we’ve finally released Stuffed Tracker (I’ll post a separate story about this later) we can concentrate on finishing Factory Nova.

I think I can safely say that 90% of the functionality is already complete in Factory Nova. We are using it ourselves for around 6 months now and I can report that it helped us a lot in the Stuffed Tracker development.

Most interesting features added in the last 30 days:

1. Filters for tasks — we now have powerful filters in the Tasks module. With filters we can specify certain conditions and display only the tasks that match these conditions (for example, tasks assigned to a certain user or users or tasks assigned to me with the high priority and with a deadline in the next 3 days). Filters could be saved for easy re-use later.
2. Modules could be switched off — now it is possible to select what modules you want to have in a particular project (we currently have Tasks, Emails, Forums, Knowledge Base and Files available). So we can now have a project that only has Forums module, for example (we’ve called this project “Lounge” and this is a place where the team hangs out and posts interesting news and stuff).
3. Labels — we can assign one or more labels to any task and then use filters to quickly see tasks belonging to one or more labels. This is a very flexible solution. Labels could be used to mark tasks that should be done for a certain version release, or tasks that are “Bugs” or tasks that are “Features” and so on.
4. Tree view and a flat list — it is now possible to view the tasks both as a tree and as a flat list. I’ve never seen this functionality in other project management software, but it is really useful. Sometimes you need a tree view, and sometimes you need a flat view (where tasks are sorted by priority, deadline, etc).

And finally, we are experimenting with file uploads in Flash 8 that was released not long ago. It looks like a little revolution, actually. Finally it is possible to upload a file or even several files from inside the browser and see the progress of the upload. It is even possible to cancel the upload while it is in progress.