Bug, fixed: downloading the latest version of a document, for direct sign up users

Bug Fixes, Technology, ,

Thanks to our users at Oxbow Farm, we have found and fixed a bug that affected users who signed up directly with Kerika: clicking on an attachment in the card details was downloading the original version of a file, not the latest.

Here’s what was happening: when you add a file to a card or canvas, Kerika checks to see if that file was already being used on that particular card or canvas.  If so, Kerika automatically handles your latest upload as providing a new version of the old file, so you see just one entry in your card attachments view:

The bug that we recently discovered, and fixed, resulted in Kerika downloading the original version of the file when you used the download option that appears after you select an attachment from the list of attachments on a card.

If you clicked on the attachment’s thumbnail to open a preview of the file, Kerika was correctly opening the latest version of the file. The bug was only in the download action, and that’s been taken care of now.

Our youngest Kerika users do amazing stuff

Academic & Nonprofit, Kerika

For the past few years Stéphane Vassort from College La Grange Du Bois in Savigny-le-Temple in France has been using Kerika with his middle-school students who have been building 3-wheel trikes as part of their science curriculum.

He recently shared this heartwarming video of his students — surely among the youngest Kerika users in the world! — with the trikes they have built:

https://youtu.be/2ChNIUaxqW4

We are so happy to be supporting this kind of work!  If you are interested in getting a free Academic & Nonprofit Account like Stéphane, please let us know.

A bunch of bug fixes

Bug Fixes,

We have been busy through the holiday season, as usual, but there isn’t a lot of stuff to show you yet since the big new thing we are working on — a more automated and efficient account management and billing system — won’t be ready for a while.

Meanwhile, we have been working through bug fixes on a regular basis; many of them obscure and probably unnoticed by anyone but the Kerika team itself, but we don’t like to have known bugs sitting around so we knock off bugs fairly quickly even if no one has complained (yet).

Here are some of the bug fixes we have done recently (in no particular order):

  1. A problem that affected direct sign up users who wanted to preview their documents, but didn’t allow third-party cookies to be set in their browsers.
  2. An obscure situation where someone who owned a board, but wasn’t part of the board team, shared it with another user: in some situations the second user didn’t see this board listed correctly in their Shared With Me tab of their Home page.
  3. Another obscure circumstance in which a board owner’s face wasn’t shown correctly in the Shared With Me tab of other users.
  4. Helping a user restore access to a board that had gotten corrupted somehow in the database: this wasn’t the user’s fault and we wanted to make sure no work was lost.
  5. Some improvements to labels used in My Preferences to clarify (better) the user’s choices.
  6. Fixing at least one situation where someone wanting to sign up with their Google ID (as a Kerika+Google user) was getting endlessly redirected by Google and never reaching Kerika.  (For some reason everyone who reported this problem is located in Norway; don’t know why…)
  7. A problem affecting direct sign up users: they weren’t seeing thumbnails of their files in their Kerika cards and canvases.
  8. Some situations where a browser left running Kerika overnight didn’t refresh itself automatically the next morning, and required the user to manually refresh the view.
  9. A bug that kept cards with Critical priority from showing up correctly in the What Needs Attention View.
  10. Decided to spell “synch” as “sync” in the Calendar dialog, although we still don’t agree that “sync” is a better spelling than “synch”.
  11. Numerous updates to our website: our product’s functionality keeps expanding so fast that we need to remember to update our website every few months!

Happy New Year!

Kanban vs Scrum: what’s the difference, and which should you use?

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

We have a complete (one-hour long) video of the tutorial presented by Arun Kumar, CEO of Kerika, at the recent Lean Transformation Conference on the subject of Kanban vs Scrum: what’s the difference, and which should you use?

(The slides for this talk, and more, can be found on Slideshare.)

Topics covered:

Forming a team 00:01:32

The Product Owner 00:02:01

The Scrum Master 00:02:55

The Scrum Team 00:03:55

Pulling Work 00:04:04

The Product Backlog 00:05:45

Scrum Stories 00:06:25

Writing a good Story 00:07:35

From Epics to Stories 00:10:25

From Stories to Tasks 00:11:13

Estimating with Story Points 00:13:04

Organizing a Sprint 00:15:00

How long is a Sprint? 00:19:15

Sprints in theory 00:20:32

Sprints in real-life 00:20:53

Daily Standups 00:23:25

Burndown Charts 00:24:13

Team Velocity 00:25:35

Best Practices for Getting Scrum Right 00:28:00

The Nuclear Option 00:30:57

Where does Scrum work best? 00:32:02

Scrum in Government 00:33:25

Where does Kanban work best? 00:35:43

Collaboration Networks 00:37:25

Paper doesn’t scale 00:38:30

Using Kerika for Personal Kanban 00:39:50

Using Kerika for Team Kanban 00:40:24

Using Kerika in the Public Sector 00:40:37

Using Kerika for Scrum Projects 00:40:54

Capturing stories as “virtual sticky notes” 00:41:20

Summary 00:42:57

Question: how do you deal with poor performers on the team? 00:49:15

Question: in Scrum, are units of measure like lines of code still applicable? 00:50:08

Question: how do you measure individual performance? 00:51:03

Question: how do you handle poor performers within a team? 00:52:25

Question: when do you use the Nuclear Option? 00:54:20

Question: how do you estimate stories? 00:55:54

Photo credits: Abdul-Rasul Kassamali, Jama Abdirahman.

We made it easier to prioritize work

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Usability, , , ,

For users of Kerika’s Task Boards and Scrum Boards, we have made it easier to prioritize your work.

Background:

Traditionally, in a Kanban or Scrum board the priority is denoted by the position of the card within a column: cards that are higher priority are placed higher within a column, and the card at the top of the column is the highest priority at that stage of the workflow.

For example, in this view of a board the highest priority item for Planning & Design is the card on top of that column:

Highest priority item in Planning and Design
Highest priority item in Planning and Design

This method has the advantage of simplicity and clarity: there is no ambiguity about what is the most important work item at any stage of the workflow.

The disadvantage of this method is that as many cards start to move across the board, especially on boards where the workflow is complex (i.e. the board has many columns), it becomes harder to track all the cards that are especially important.

In other words: the simple method doesn’t scale well, and our goal with Kerika is to provide the simplest user interface on top of the most capable work management system, so we realized we needed to do something more.

Flagging cards

With our latest version, Kerika makes it easier to explicitly tag each card with a priority of Normal, High or Critical:

Setting Priority
Setting Priority

Along with assigning tags to a card, you can now set the priority of the card as well: by default all cards are Normal, but they can alternatively be flagged as High Priority or Critical.

Viewing all the High Priority and Critical Cards

We have also extended the Highlights function for Task Boards and Scrum Boards to make it easy to quickly see all the High Priority and Critical cards on a crowded board:

Highlighting high priority and critical items
Highlighting high priority and critical items

When you are looking at a board, the High Priority and Critical cards are also highlighted with small stars: a solid red star for Critical, and a hollow red star for High Priority:

High Priority and Critical cards
High Priority and Critical cards

The Normal Priority cards don’t have any star; we didn’t want to crowd the design which would have made it harder to spot the more important High Priority and Critical cards at a glance.

High Priority and Critical Cards across all your Boards

And, finally, we have enhanced the What Needs Attention View to include columns for the High Priority and Critical cards across all the boards where you are a Board Admin, or where you have been assigned the card as a Team Member:

What Needs Attention View
What Needs Attention View

Managing multiple Due Dates became easier

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Usability, , , ,

We have made it easier for teams to manage multiple Due Dates within the same project, especially when a single work item (as represented by a Task Board or Scrum Board card) contains many different sub-tasks, each of which could have a different Due Date.

Where a card has multiple tasks, each with different Due Dates, the range of dates is shown on cards to make it easier to understand the “time footprint” of the work item as a whole.

Here’s an example of a card with two open/remaining tasks, one of which is due today and the other tomorrow:

Tasks with different due dates
Tasks with different due dates

When viewed on a Task Board or Scrum Board, Kerika will show the range of dates involved for this card:

Tasks with a range of Due Dates
Tasks with a range of Due Dates

This provides better context, better usability for users who work with due dates: at a glance you can see the overall “time footprint” of a work item that involves several sub-tasks.

The What’s Assigned to Me and What’s Due Views are now smarter about handling multiple due dates for the same card: if just one task within a card is overdue, even though the card as a whole isn’t yet overdue, this is shown in the Overdue column in these Views.

Your 6AM summary email (which you can turn on optionally) now lists the due dates on individual tasks within cards, as these become overdue or due this week or next week.

 

We made it easier to see what you are hiding

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Usability, , ,

We have made a tweak to the Hide Column feature that’s available on every Task Board and Scrum Board, for all Board Admins, Team Members and Visitors.

Previously, when you hid a column Kerika would show that like this:

Hiding columns (before)
Hiding columns (before)

The name of the column that was being hidden was shown vertically, to make it easier to retain the overall context of the board.

We have improved this so hidden columns now look like this:

Hiding columns (now)
Hiding columns (now)

The subtle (but important) distinction is that Kerika now shows you how many cards are in the hidden columns, not just the name of the column.  We think this will make this feature more useful, to more people, more of the time.

An easier way to get in touch with us

Kerika

We have made a bunch of improvements to the Contact Us feature in Kerika, which — as before — can be accessed by clicking on the help button (“?”) in the top-right corner of the Kerika app:

Contact Us
Contact Us

Previously this simply opened up your local email client to send us a message; now the feature is built into Kerika itself, and is smarter about how it works.

When we analyzed our old trouble tickets, and emails to support@kerika.com in general, we found there were very few instances of actual bugs being found, but more commonly there was some confusion about how Kerika was working for the users.

And very frequently when people got in touch with us, they didn’t include important information in their original emails that would help us understand what problem they were currently facing.

This meant we had to reply back to ask them some common questions, like “have you already invited this person to join your board?”, and this led to unwelcome delays in resolving the problem for our users, especially when they were located many time-zones away and there was a 24-hour delay before they replied, and then we replied, and so on.

Our new Contact Us dialog, while very simple in appearance, acts as a smart collector of key information that can help us understand the context of the user’s query:

  • Which board was she looking at, when she decided to contact us? Many users assume that the Kerika team can automatically view their boards, but this isn’t true: it’s not just against our privacy policy; our software was designed to protect your privacy from our intrusion as well.
  • Who is part of this board team right now? Again, this isn’t something we would know without being told by the user, since we don’t have any easy way to look at someone else’s boards.  If you think you have added someone to your board, but haven’t yet, this can help us clarify any misunderstanding on your part.
  • What’s the current state of your Inbox and Sentbox? Are there invitations waiting for you to accept that perhaps got missed, because they unfortunately ended up in your spam folder? Are there invitations that you had previously sent to coworkers, that haven’t been accepted yet?
  • What’s your current computer environment? What operating system and browser are you using? In the very few instances when someone reports an actual bug, it’s very important to know which browser and OS they were using, since the bug may be limited to a single environment.

And, finally, the Contact Us process reminds our users that any intermittent problem they are facing can often be resolved simply by refreshing their browser: if they had experienced any fleeting network problem or latency that interfered with their Kerika view, a simple browser refresh will fix that quickly.