Category Archives: Kerika

Posts about Kerika, the company and its people

Presenting at OFM’s Fall Forum last week

Agile & Scrum, Government, Kanban & Lean, Kerika, , ,

Ben Vaught, from the Washington State Office of the CIO, and I had the pleasure of presenting at the state’s Office of Financial Management’s Fall Forum last week, held over two days at the Thurston County Fairgrounds in Olympia.

Ben talked about the use of visual processes as part of the Washington Business One Stop initiative he has been working on for a while, and towards the end of his talk he showed some pictures of the WIKISPEED garage in Lynnwood, where I first met Ben and Michael DeAngelo, Deputy CIO for the state.

My talk was supposed to have been on Visual Management in government and administrative processes, but seeing pictures of the old WIKISPEED garage, which used to be covered with stickies on all walls (including the massive garage doors!) before the team adopted Kerika to knit together their global community of volunteers, was a wonderful throwback moment!

When it came to my turn, in addition to showing the use of Kerika for cross-agency GIS projects, such as those led by Joy Paulus, I was also able to show examples of Kerika in use by Sherri Hrubi, Danica Ersland and Melissa Wideman, who all work together in OFM’s HR Division.

Several other people presented, including Irene Hill and her design team from the Department of Licensing, Howard Cox from the Department of Enterprise Services, and Eric Gardner from OFM’s Forecasting Division.

Google was flaky for 2 hours today!

Kerika, Technology

Between the hours of 9AM and 11AM PST, Google’s authentication service — which we used to sign in users of Kerika+Google — kept having problems that affected people at random.

It was a tough morning for us, dealing with the flood of “504 System Timeout” errors coming back from Google, and feeling helpless that we couldn’t provide the kind of high-quality user experience that is at the core of the Kerika brand.

The problems finally went away by themselves, but a total of 31 Kerika users were affected and we are reaching out to each of them individually to apologize for the inconvenience, and explain what happened.

This is one of those situations where Kerika cannot do anything to fix the problem: if you signed up as a Kerika+Google user, when you try to login to Kerika you are automatically redirected to Google’s authentication service, which then comes back to Kerika to give us your identity information.

Then, we use the identity information to log you into the correct Kerika account.

Normally, all this happens really fast: you click on the Sign In button at Kerika, Kerika redirects your browser to Google, Google responds immediately, and within a couple of seconds you are logged into Kerika.

It all happens so fast and smoothly, 99.999% of the time, that most people are completely unaware that their browser was even redirected to Google in the first place — it’s something you might notice only if you have a very slow WiFi connection, and you are paying close attention to your browser’s status bar.

But every once in a while, Google won’t respond when you get redirected there by Kerika. In that case we retry again several times, and then finally Kerika does a “timeout”: it gives up.

(This problem has happened before, and as software developers ourselves, we are, of course, very sympathetic to other software companies that experience occasional bugs and hiccups, but Google can be irksome in their lack of transparency.)

This happens so infrequently that we didn’t really have any special code in place to tell users why they were not able to login, but that’s going to change starting tomorrow: if Google’s servers are not responding fast enough, we will show a special page to the user explaining what’s happening, so they understand the situation better.

 

Google has been flaky all morning

Kerika

Between 9AM and 11AM Pacific Standard Time, Google’s authentication service threw up about about 60 errors, which gave many of our users a rough ride.

The problem was that Google’s authentication servers were timing out repeatedly, showing errors like this:

Request URL: https://kerika.com/authcallback/google?code=XXXXXXXX
Request Method: GET
Status Code: 504 Gateway Timeout

There isn’t anything we can do in this situation to help our Kerika+Google users, unfortunately, since Google’s authentication service needs to be up and running in order to log in to Kerika.

The silver lining in this cloud, for now, is that this is a relatively rare occurrence.

Our newest version: tablet improvements, Google Apps Marketplace upgrade

Agile & Scrum, Kerika, Usability, , , ,

Our newest update to Kerika serves up a rather long list of changes; the two big areas for improvement were:

  • We have updated our integration with Google Apps Marketplace to use OAuth 2.0, since Google is retiring its OAuth 1.0 implementation.
  • We have made a bunch of improvements for using Kerika on iPads, with the Safari or Chrome browsers.  (We still need to work on Android tablets, which, unfortunately, present too much variety…)

The OAuth 2.0 upgrade and iPad improvements are described in previous posts; here we want to highlight some of the other changes and improvements we made with this new version:

In addition to being less distracting, this new design will enable us to expand the palette of colors we can offer: the old design restricted us to only the lighter pastel colors.

New styling for colored cards
New styling for colored cards

 

  • We have redesigned our “Max Canvas” view so that it provides the most useful display, when you need the most space available to view a large board. In particular, you can now access Search even when you are in the Max Canvas view.We have improved security, by implementing secure cookies.
  • We added some subtle animation effects to improve usability. (So subtle, in fact, that you might not even notice them if you are an existing Kerika user, which is just what we want.)

In terms of infrastructure and other under-the-hood improvements, we have expanded our use of JUnit automated tests and done a bunch of bugs fixes, as usual.

There’s a lot of improvements being done on Kerika, and at a very fast rate. Make sure you subscribe to our blog to keep up!

 

We should probably stop saying “unlimited cards”…

Kerika, Technology,

OK, so our website has long stressed the word “unlimited”, and maybe that’s not such a great idea…

Most people have boards with a few dozen cards.

Some folks have boards with a couple of hundred cards.

Very few people have boards with up to 1,000 cards.

It turned out that one of our users had a board with nearly 4,200 cards, of which over 4,000 were in the Trash.

And that’s not good! A board with several thousand cards on it is going to take a long time to load, because each card has many different attributes to it: details, chat, assignments, status, history, etc.

And when someone with a very large board uses Kerika, this can cause very unexpected loads on the servers, particularly in terms of network I/O and CPU utilization.

This is what it looks like when someone suddenly opens a board with thousands of cards on it:

CPU spikes
CPU spikes

We have talked about this before, and now we need to do something about it…

Most of the time, boards get very big because they are very old: stuff piles up in the Done column, or, as in this case, in the Trash column.

Having very large boards can impact performance: unlike, say, email which you may be accustomed to leaving piled up in your Inbox for years on end, Kerika’s cards are “live object”: even when a card is in the Done or Trash columns, it is constantly listening for updates from the server, because it could be moved out of Done or Trash at any time by someone on the team, or have some of it’s attributes changed.

For example, even though a card is “Done” or “Trashed”, it could have its details updated, or new chat added to it.

This is different from email messages, which are essentially “dead objects”: once you get an email and read it, it doesn’t update after that, so it can sit for years in your Inbox without trying to get fresh updates from the mail server.

So, when you have 4,200 cards on a single board, you have that many live objects trying to get updates from the server at the same time, and that’s not good for your browser or our server!

(Imagine your laptop trying to read and display 4,200 emails at the same time, and you will get an idea of the problem…)

Having very large boards is not a good idea from a workflow or process management perspective, and so perhaps Kerika needs to do something about it: we need to think about how we can help our users improve their workflow, while also avoiding these CPU spikes.

A couple of ideas that we are considering:

  • Start warning users when their boards are getting too big.
  • If boards hit some threshold values (which we have yet to figure out, maybe it’s 1,000 cards?) force the user to reconfigure their board so they don’t affect the quality of the service for everyone.

 

Exporting Kanban and Scrum Boards: a new Kerika feature

Agile & Scrum, Government, Kanban & Lean, Kerika, ,

We have a great new Export feature for all Task Boards (i.e. Kanban Boards) and Scrum Boards.

The Export feature is simple, elegant and powerful, and is available to all Project Leaders, Team Members and Visitors on the project team.

To access this feature, simply click on the Project Info button that’s shown at the top-right of each Kerika Board, and you will see the Project Info display (that we have talked about in an earlier blog post):

Export
Export

CSV format is useful if you want to want to take data from Kerika and put it into Excel or some other analysis tool;

HTML format is useful if you want to print material from Kerika, or insert it into Word, PowerPoint or similar tools.

With both CSV and HTML exports, hidden cards are not exported: this means that if you are currently choosing to hide some columns (by using the Workflow button), or hide some cards (by using the Tags filters), then the cards that you are not viewing right now will not be part of the export.

When you export a board in CSV format, you get the following data, for each visible card:

Example of CSV export
Example of CSV export

Column Name: e.g. Backlog, In Progress, Done, etc.

Card Name: e.g. “Create PR news release”.

Card Description: e.g. “We need to create a PR news release once our latest version is ready…” (Rich text will be converted to plain text, since CSV files can only deal with plain text.)

Status: e.g. Needs Review, Needs Rework, etc. (If the card doesn’t have a special status, “Normal” will be shown.)

Due Date: the date the card is due, if a date has been set.  (If the card doesn’t have a Due Date, “Not Scheduled” will appear.)

Assigned To: a list of names of the people the card is currently assigned to.  (If the card isn’t assigned to anyone, “Not Assigned” will appear.)

Exporting could take a while: the exported data are put into a file in your Google Drive or Box account — depending upon whether you are using Kerika+Google or Kerika+Box — and when the process completes, you get an email with a link to the file containing your data.

It’s a similar experience if you do a HTML export; however the format of the data is different, giving you an indented set of attributes for each card, like this example from a Kerika+Box project:

Example of HTML export
Example of HTML export from Kerika+Box

One caveat about exporting HTML: if you open the results in Google Docs, Google shows a preview of the output, and that doesn’t look good: instead of rendering the HTML, Google actually exposes it.

Here’s an example from a Kerika+Google project:

HTML preview in Google Docs
Example of HTML export from Kerika+Google

The export feature can be used for many different purposes, of course: the most common scenario we envision is people wanting to include material from Kerika in their analysis and presentations.

And, of course, one use would be for government agencies that have to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, or other Sunshine laws.

Kerika @ Washington State Lean Transformation Conference

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Kerika, ,

Come join us at the Washington State Lean Transformation Conference, to be held October 21-22, 2014 at the Greater Tacoma Convention & Trade Center  in downtown Tacoma at 1500 Broadway Tacoma, Washington!

Arun Kumar, Kerika’s CEO, will present a special Breakout Session on One team, many places: creating collaboration networks for distributed workgroups

The vision of Lean Government is about collaborating across offices, across agencies, and even across sectors. In an era of flat or even declining budgets, it’s become essential to get Lean across the state, not just across the room.

The old technologies never really supported distributed Lean and Agile, but that’s all changed now: a new generation of browser-based work management tools makes it fast and easy to build Lean and Agile teams that connect professionals across agencies, and across sectors so that expertise from the private sector, academia, and nonprofits can be leveraged to deliver great results in Washington.

This breakout session will feature a look at some great cross-agency projects and cross-sector projects: initiatives that have succeeded in delivering in a way that was unimaginable only a couple of years ago.

The session will be presented at 12:15PM in Room 318 on October 21, and again at 10AM in Room 318 on October 22.

If you are working in state, county or local city government and are interested in Lean and Agile, be sure to join us: the cost for attending is just one can of food, which will be donated to a food bank :-)

Kerika @ BoxWorks14

Kerika

We were at Boxworks14 last week, and had a great time!

We met a bunch of interesting folks, including Heidi Williams, Senior Director of Platform Engineering, who — along with Peter Rexer and others from her team — gave some really insightful deep-dives into Box’s technology stack.

(Among other things we learned that we could improve the Kerika user experience by changing the way we do OAuth 2.0 with Box.)

Keynote speeches were amazing: the hyper-kinetic Aaron Levie made for a rousing start, but the real star was Jared Leto who not only brought his Oscar onstage, but in a jaw-dropping move handed it over the audience for people to take selfies with while he blithely continued with his “Fireside Chat”.

Jared’s move even upstaged Aaron, which is pretty hard to do (as you will know, if you have ever encountered Aaron in the flesh…)

Other great speakers included Jim Collins, author of Built to Last, Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures (and, originally, Kleiner Perkins and Sun Microsystems), and Andrew McAfee from MIT.