Monthly Archives: September 2014

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!

 

The new OAuth 2.0 integration with Google Apps

Technology

With our latest version, we will be using OAuth 2.0 uniformly across all the ways you could sign up for Kerika:

  • As a Google Apps for Business user, e.g. someone who has the premium (paid) version of Google Apps, and signs up at kerika.com or through the Google Apps Marketplace.
  • As a free or premium user of Box, who signs up at kerika.com or through the Box App Store.

Across all these, we are now using OAuth 2.0: the more modern, robust implementation of OAuth which lets you sign into Kerika using a Google or Box ID, without Kerika ever seeing your password!

(Background: while we were using OAuth 2.0 for people who signed up directly at Kerika.com, we had OAuth 1.0 in place for people who signed up through the Google Apps Marketplace, and we needed to make every pathway consistently work with OAuth 2.0 and completely get rid of OAuth 1.0)

This new version will affect all premium users of Google Apps:

With the old (OAuth 1.0) integration with Google, it was possible for individual users who had the premium version of Google Apps to sign up for Kerika.

With the new (OAuth 2.0) integration, the Google Apps Administrator for the domain (i.e. your company) to authorize Kerika for the entire domain.

In other words, if you are a premium user of Google Apps, your Google Apps Admin — typically someone in your IT department — will need to authorize Kerika for your domain before you can use Kerika.

This will affect you even if you are an existing user of Kerika.

The good news is that once your Google Apps Admin authorizes Kerika for your company’s domain, it won’t be necessary for individual users to authorize Kerika any more: it becomes much easier for your colleagues to sign 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.

Project Info summary of your Kerika Board: a new Kerika feature

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Technology, , ,

We are thrilled to announce a new feature in Kerika: a very useful Project Info display that summarizes of your project.

You can access this by clicking on the new Info button that appears in your Kerika toolbar, at the top-right corner of your board view:

Project Info display
Project Info display

This view is available to everyone who is part of the project team:  Project Leaders, Team Members and Visitors.

There are several sections in here: at the top is the Name and Description of the project:

Name and Description
Name and Description

The Description is a new attribute of Kerika’s boards: it lets you provide context about the project that can help orient new team members, and it can also help with your Searches in the future.

The Name and Description of a project can be modified at any time by Project Leader or Account Owner.

Next up is the Summary of the project:

Summary
Summary

The summary varies by the type of board (Whiteboards, Task Boards or Scrum Boards), but it provides useful information in all cases:

  • It tells you when the board was first created, and by whom.
  • It tells you when the board was last updated, and by whom.
  • And for Task Boards and Scrum Boards it tells you how many cards are done, and how many remain.

Since each card typically represents a work item, this is a quick way to find out how much work remains on a board, without having to count up all the cards in each column.

For Task Boards and Scrum Boards, this view also shows you how many cards are due today, due tomorrow, and overdue.

And for Scrum Boards, it shows you how many cards are in the Backlog that you are using, so you get a sense for how far along you are with the overall project, not just the current Sprint.

All Kerika Task Boards and Scrum Boards now have support for Work-In-Progress Limits: these can be turned on or off by the Project Leader or Account Owner:

Settings
Settings

Another huge new change: we are making it super easy to switch a board from being a Kanban Board to a Scrum Board, and back again.

Task Boards and Scrum Boards also have a new auto-numbering feature that can help you manage very large boards, e.g. if you are using Kerika for an internal Help Desk.

For both Tasks Boards and Scrum Boards, there is now a great new Export feature that lets you export cards from a board in CSV or HTML formats:

Export
Export

And, finally, you now have the option to make individual projects open to the public to view (but not change): a handy feature for open-source and volunteer-based projects like WIKISPEED:

Privacy
Privacy

Kerika @ PMI Olympia Chapter

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean,

Arun Kumar, Kerika’s CEO, and Beth Albertson, Solutions Architect from Washington State’s Department of Social and Health Services will be jointly presenting at the November 18, 2014 dinner meeting of the Project Management Institute’s Olympia Chapter.

The topic will be  Using web-based work management for distributed and agile teams.

If you are interested in project management, and are close to the Olympia, Washington area, please sign up for this dinner event!

PMI
PMI dinner

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.