The Worklog Assistant Blog

An easy way to get more feedback: Shout!

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:00:00 +0000

User feedback is critical to making your application better. I absolutely crave feedback from users. However, it is probably also one of the trickiest things to accomplish. Feedback helps me guide new features and heavily informs upcoming versions.

My application, Worklog Assistant, just helps with JIRA time tracking. In the big picture, it's really quite boring to most people. So if it does the job, most people are content not to say anything. I thought that I should get more people to offer feedback, for better or worse. Maybe there are some obvious things I am missing (hint: there are!)

So, some time in January, I tweeted about an upcoming (very unscientific) experiment. At the time, I did not mention details to anyone. As you can guess, it had something to do with gathering more feedback.

At the top of Worklog Assistant's main screen, there are a few icons as seen below:

The little blue speech bubble has a tooltip which simply said "Send Feedback". Using Thunderbird's filtering capability, let's see how much feedback I got through this button over a seven month period:

That is a grand total of 8. E-i-g-h-t. Wow. According to Google Analytics, that is from a total of about 200 unique visits, for roughly 4% over all of 2009. I repeat: ALL OF 2009! Initially, I thought maybe no one cared (sniffle.) But then I sat back and thought about it from a user's perspective. Do I really want to "send feedback" for any apps that I use? The answer: ABSOLUTELY NOT!

Generally, I want to have a conversation with the authors of the application. And this has been my exact experience when talking to users. So I thought about it for a little bit. Eventually, I settled on changing the blue speech bubble to the following:

Why "Shout!"? I'd like to say this was based on some intuition but basically, I wanted something that people would click on which had some vague relation to its intended purpose and was enough to interest people. I released this change around the end of January and didn't really bother to check into it until a certain someone reminded me. Of course, I tweeted about the "experiment's" success!

Here are the cold hard statistics:

170 unique visits to the target page in ONE MONTH due to this simple change. Compare this to 200 for the whole of 2009 and part of 2010.
Thunderbird says 12 new questions/suggestions as a result, a rate of 7%

The bottom line here seems to be that not only did I get more click-through, but the target page encouraged more people to initiate participation!

But there is another side effect. Some people that had never participated before now started to comment and vote on things they were interested in. So I think I've comfortably got a lower bound for new participation.

Conclusion

There is none. This is not a proper statistical test. But I think there is something there. What do you think?

Nitpicks and clarifications:

But this is not scientific! Yes, I know.
But you don't know whether it was the presence of the text or the value of the text which caused the greater traffic! Actually, yes I do (within the boundaries of being unscientific to begin with.) The first screenshot shown above was preceded by exactly the same icon but with "Send Feedback". Miserable, miserable click through.
But you could have had a 1000-fold increase in customers in that month! Oh, how I wish that were true.
But it could be because February is after January! Yes, you're 100% right. It could be.
But you said all of 2009 and 7 months! You liar! Well, I took a shortcut: The 7 months was the entire time the button was active so technically, I'm not lying.

Well I hope that was interesting for you. It certainly was interesting for me. Big thank you to "dermike" for reminding me to check into my experiment. You made my day.

Feel free to nitpick some more.

Wanted: Brave souls for an experiment

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:31:00 +0000

I am in need of some brave souls who are willing to be part of a small experiment. I suspect most readers of this blog will meet the simple criteria I have for participants which is why I posted here.

The purpose of this experiment is to get an idea of what your work on the computer is like, in terms of context switches and away time. This will be represented in a simple graphical way which you may find useful even after the experiment. You can see an example at the bottom of this post.

All I would require from you is to let the application run in the background and send me a screenshot of the state of the application when you are done your work day. You can do this as often as you like but at least once at the end of your day is requested.

If you are interested, please email me and include:

Your primary job function (web developer, technical documentation, etc)
Your operating system
Whether you currently use JIRA or another project management tool

I look forward to hearing from you!

New release (1.0.1276)

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 22:34:00 +0000

A new release is available:

This release brings a couple of major bug fixes as well as some minor new features. The rest of this post discusses one of the new features. Your life may be made more complete by reading it.

JIRA's standard workflow is a little something like:

Enter issue
Assign to user
User starts progress
User tracks time against issue
User resolves issue (progress implicitly stopped)
Issue is verified and closed

If you're anything like me, you probably forget to do steps 3 and 4 regularly. Worklog Assistant helps you track your time in JIRA by being an interface you can go to to accomplish 80-90% of the work you need to do with your JIRA tickets. Indeed, if all it did was let you log your time worked, it probably would not be very helpful. Some of the things you can do from the Worklog Assistant interface:

Issue filtering and free text search
Workflow transitions (stop progress, resolve issue, etc)
Commenting on issues
Issue operations (edit, move, etc)

Typically, when you start tracking time against an issue, you are starting progress on the issue. However, JIRA has no mechanism that I know of (besides writing a server-side plugin) to perform the "Start Progress" transition when you log work.

So now, Worklog Assistant will helpfully execute the "Start Progress" transition the first time you log work against an issue. This means you never have to remember steps 3 and 4 again! One less thing to remember makes for happy people and happy people can only be good for your project.

With that, I bid you good day and hope this coming week sees you make a lot of progress!

Now, if only Worklog Assistant could do my work for me...

New release (1.0.1135)

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 01:36:00 +0000

The first release of the new year is available:

This release includes some bug fixes and a new feature. See the release notes for details on the bug fixes.

Some users and myself noticed that a lot of the time, as soon as we turn off a timer, we published the worklogs to JIRA right away. So my workflow would be a lot like:

Start timer
Do some work
Stop timer
Command-P for publish (or CTRL-P on Windows/Linux)

Now you can click the "Automatically submit worklogs" option in the redesigned configuration window as shown below:

Whenever a worklog is added to the pending worklogs, it is automatically submitted. Any errors that occur are reported to you otherwise you can continue on your work. This is a good way to ensure that you don't forget to submit your worklogs to JIRA. As it turns out, this is a common occurrence. Hopefully this lets you work with a bit more security on that end of things.

Well, that's all for now! Have a good week and happy time tracking :)

New release (1.0.1131) and x64 support for Linux

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:00:00 +0000

Note: I suggest everyone upgrade to this release if possible.

It finally happened. After attempting for as long as possible to have a single deb/tgz for 32 and 64-bit on Linux, I gave in and created a 64-bit package. The main reason for this was that Worklog Assistant now uses gnome-keyring to store passwords on Linux. As gnome-keyring is not part of the ia32-libs package, this meant a 64-bit package was needed.

If you install the PAM module, the keyring will be unlocked on login, otherwise the keyring software will prompt you to enter your keyring password when you launch Worklog Assistant.

So now, time tracking for JIRA just got a little bit better on Linux ;-)

There is also one bug fix due to the recent change to group worklogs by issue in the pending worklogs screen.

Thanks for your time and happy time tracking!

New release (1.0.1128)

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:16:00 +0000

A new release is available. There are two major feature improvements in this release as well as official JIRA 4.0 support! The first being that pending worklogs are now grouped and summarized by issue. This should make it easier to see what you have worked on before submitting.

The next improvement is one of my favourites: on Mac, the dock icon now contains the total of all the pending worklogs as well as the current active task. See the screenshot below:

There are also some minor but useful improvements to the idle time detection. Previously, when you returned from idle, say to check email or the time, Worklog Assistant would pop up and ask you if you wanted to apply the away time to a task. This behaviour has not changed.

However, the dialog would previously assume that if you returned, you were back for good. Now, when you return, you can leave the dialog open and Worklog Assistant will continue to track your away time. When you finally return and accept, the correct away time will be used.

This is very useful for those cases where you are doing a software build, or a run of tests and just come back to check if they are done. From now on, you can just leave the notice open and your away time will continue to be tracked.

JIRA 4.0 support

Thanks to the awesome backward compatibility work by Atlassian, Worklog Assistant always maintained JIRA 4.0 support. However, I can finally say that JIRA 4.0 is now officially supported. This includes the server side plugin as well as the desktop client. As an aside, I have officially switched to using JIRA 4.0 internally and it is at least 100 times better than JIRA 4.0. My favourite "new" features:

Dashboard - Awesome!
Activity stream - What issue did I just change?
Greenhopper!

I used Greenhopper to manage this release and I must say I am never going back to the old way of bulk filter changes.

Last but not least, there is now a new "thin" installer for Linux. Basically, you untar+gunzip and you are ready to go. This should help on non-Ubuntu platforms.

I hope you find these new changes to be useful, I know I have. If you find any issues, please let me know.

Happy time tracking and have a good week!

New beta available

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:52:00 +0000

It's been a while since a proper release but I'm coming around to it!

This beta has a bunch of minor improvements and one really cool new feature for Mac: a badge label for the Worklog Assistant application icon. Now, when you are tracking time and have pending worklogs to submit, the Worklog Assistant icon will show a label with the sum total of the elapsed time. Here is an example of what it looks like:

Pretty cool! Anyway, head on over to the beta site and give it a run, you'll be glad you did! Please let me know if you have any problems or suggestions.

New release (1.0.1123)

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:42:00 +0000

A new release is available. This is a bug fix release. Please see the release notes for more information.

Happy time tracking and have a good week!

New release (1.0.1122)

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 03:14:00 +0000

A new release is available. This is mainly a bug fix release. Please see the release notes for more information.

Happy time tracking and have a good week!

New release (1.0.1118)

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:20:00 +0000

A new release is available. This release contains one minor new feature to do with custom fields with dates and some bug fixes. Please see the release notes for more information.

Happy time tracking and have a good week!

New release (1.0.1115)

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 03:32:00 +0000

A new release of Worklog Assistant is available. This is a bug fix release with a few Mac-specific fixes. There is also one minor change to the way we handle errors when submitting worklogs to JIRA. Please see the release notes for more information.

Happy time tracking and have a good week!

New release (1.0.1113), logo design contest

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 20:40:00 +0000

A new release of Worklog Assistant is available. This is a small release in the number of changes from the last release but it is recommended to upgrade to this release.

The main change is a fix in how the view state for the list of JIRA issues is stored. Due to the nature of the problem, you will have to reconfigure your view. Please let me know if you have any issues.

Logo design contest

TheWorklog Assistant logo design contest on crowdSPRING has been concluded. I have a week to make my decision. There are some really good entries there. I am not certain on which one I will choose but if there are any that stand out, please tell me which ones in the comments!

Running the contest on crowdSPRING has been great. The one thing I've noticed from other contests is that people tend to submit multiple variations on the same theme. I'm not sure why the designers do this but I was explicit in my instructions that they should not do this. Some of them did comply but others didn't.

I notice that none of them tried to do a tree log based logo like my daughter did. How creative are these creatives anyway? ;-)

Happy time tracking and have a good week!

New logo competition

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 04:08:00 +0000

What's this about?

I know some of you have not been entirely happy with my choice of logo so far and I've heard you. As a result, I've created a competition for a new logo on crowdSPRING. What is cool about it is that all of the design takes place as a competition, so you can choose the best one.

The competition is here: http://bit.ly/ihfVC

What can I do?

Comment here on which one you like best
Leave a comment on crowdSPRING (will require registration) - This way, the designer can get your feedback.
If you are a graphic designer or know one and want to make some money, submit a logo!

Note that the competition will run until next Saturday or Sunday after which I can make a final decision. As today was the first day, there have only been two submissions so far, but feel free to take a look!

Why?

I think this is probably the one thing people have been most vocal about publicly and privately! I'm happy to give you an avenue to choose the route that will make your life a bit easier :-)

And if I don't care?

Don't say I didn't warn you!

New release (1.0.1111)

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 20:48:00 +0000

A new release is available to fix a crash caused as a result of a fix (doh.) If you tried to use the "toggle timer" action with an issue selected, you would experience this problem. Thanks to user Geoff for pointing it out and verifying that the fix worked for him. Note that the beta site has not been updated with this change yet.

Sorry for any inconvenience!

New release (1.0.1108)

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 16:26:00 +0000

A new release of Worklog Assistant is available. There are two major changes in this release. The first major change relates to when you are time tracking against an issue in JIRA and are interrupted, perhaps for a meeting or a short break. The second is to do with easier searching.

Previously, Worklog Assistant would happily track the time against the JIRA issue when you left your desk. That would still result in accurate timing when you are trying to look at the "average time to close", for example. However, some practices might require the user to book this time separately.

Enter "idle time detection."

Now, when you are away from your desk for a configurable amount of time (default is 10 minutes), Worklog Assistant stops tracking against the active JIRA issue and tracks how long you have been away. Upon your return, you are prompted to book the away time to a specific JIRA issue. You can see how this works in the sequence of screenshots found in the documentation.

The second major change is to do with the ability to create an ad-hoc filter by replacing the "other issues" field with a field that will search JIRA for issue keys as well as text searches. You can see this field in action in the screenshot below, along with the tooltip help:

In addition to these two feature changes, there have been numerous minor bug fixes along with a couple of serious ones for Mac. I hope you enjoy these changes and please let me know if you have any comments/issues about these or any other features.

Have a good week and happy time tracking!

New beta with idle-time detection

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 22:26:00 +0000

Quite often, we will walk away from our desktops perhaps to answer a phone call or attend an impromptu meeting. The last thing we would remember to do is to stop our timer on the current task.

Well, now you no longer need to remember! The new beta of Worklog Assistant automatically detects when you are away from your machine and stops the timer on the active task. On your return, Worklog Assistant will tell you how long you were away for and ask whether you want to apply the away time to a JIRA task. This works great for those persistent little interruptions.

You can see the workflow in action here.

I think this is quite possibly the coolest new feature, especially the workflow upon return, and I would be very happy with feedback.

New release (1.0.1105)

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 21:42:00 +0000

A new release of Worklog Assistant is available. The main changes are technical with a couple of bug fixes.

My favourite long-time issue has finally been solved: http://gsfn.us/t/3xak . Now Worklog Assistant will correctly detect multiple instances and prompt you. However, as always, this can still be improved further. One such improvement is here: http://gsfn.us/t/8oln . Basically, don't prompt at all, just launch the original instance. If you would like this, please add a vote!

A special thanks to some adventurous users for testing last week's beta. Although no issues were reported, I would not have been able to be as confident as I am now. So, thanks again :-)

Happy time tracking and have a good week!

New beta (could use some eyes)

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:48:00 +0000

Hey all, a new beta is available. There are behind-the-scenes changes which I had been working on all week that should make some cool new stuff possible. As a bonus, Worklog Assistant now correctly detects multiple instances!

Please download it and report bugs if you find any.

There will be no stable release this week as I work on stabilizing the beta.

A little story

As I was doing my final testing (ahem, after publishing the beta) I noticed that the Mac version had become completely messed up due to some minor but tedious misconfiguration. As a result, it would work just fine on my test machine, but not for anyone else! I stayed up till ~2am fixing it and uploaded a new beta.

This morning, my wife said she was sorry that I had to stay up late working on it. I told her that this is what dreams are made of! I have created something that whole companies use regularly and users that actually seem to care**.

For me, it was a thank you to those customers and users. For me, software development is less about software and more about solving problems. I would like to avoid all serious problems for my users if I can help it. Indeed, I was not even tired afterward and found it hard to fall asleep.

This has been my best month so far (2x anything else) so that was an added motivator. But I'd like to think I have not changed from the month where I had a single lonely sale, at least in how I approach solving problems for customers.

Happy time tracking and have a good week!

** Some users don't care about what it's called but really care that it works. For example, one user calls it "Weblog Assistant" in multiple, unrelated emails. I thought that is so awesome!

New release (1.0.1103)

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 20:02:00 +0000

A new release is available. This release fixes some issues experienced when the certificate revocation list (CRL) cannot be retrieved on Windows. Previously, you would be blamed with a message like: "Hey, you didn't enable the SOAP API!" Now, you are asked whether you wish to continue even though the CRL could not be downloaded.

There is also a rewrite of how the project and issue links were being rendered to fix a small bug. I think I've stomped out all the bugs with the rendering but if you have any issues, please let me know ASAP, preferably with steps to reproduce.

The tray icon and tray icon context menu have also had a bit of a revamp. Please let me know if you like :-)

As always, happy time tracking and have a good week!

New release (1.0.1011)

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 04:01:00 +0000

This is a bug fix release, please see the release notes for changes.

Thanks and have a good week!

New Atlassian plugin site

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Sun, 24 May 2009 20:08:00 +0000

There is a new Atlassian plugin site in the works. This site kicks some serious ass. One of the things that the website supports very well is reviews and ratings. If you have the time and are able to give a review please see the Worklog Assistant plugin page.

You might even find a little surprise there :-)

By the way, I'm pretty sure it's ok for me to link you from here but if it isn't, you didn't hear it from me!

New release (1.0.1099)

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Sun, 24 May 2009 18:26:00 +0000

A new release is available. The main change in this release is to make the "Choose Visible Columns" dialog box scrollable when there are too many custom fields. Previously, when there were too many custom fields, the dialog would scroll off the screen. This usually happened when you had many projects in JIRA with their own custom field requirements. It had quite hilarious results (where hilarious = not funny!) on some Linux machines. The Mac, on the other hand, was quite happy showing the largest algorithmically generated dialog box in the history of man:

And that was scaled to 20%! Anyway, the algorithm has been changed to make the dialog scrollable vertically as well as limit to 3 columns.

There were also some licensing related changes which were mostly to do with update notification when your license cannot be upgraded. If you experience any problems with licensing, please let me know ASAP so we can resolve it.

Happy time tracking and have a good week!

New release (1.0.1095)

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Sun, 17 May 2009 21:30:00 +0000

A new release of Worklog Assistant is available. This release fixes a bug on Mac OSX where saving the JIRA password a second time would cause a crash. If you are using Worklog Assistant on OSX, I suggest you upgrade as soon as is convenient.

There are also minor UI-related changes: when the reminder balloon pops up, the elapsed time is now shown as the current elapsed time + any pending worklogs. Previously, the pending worklogs were not included. A context menu for the tray icon has also been added.

Thanks and have a good week!

New release (1.0.1083)

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Mon, 11 May 2009 03:33:00 +0000

A boring release today: a bug fix and some modifications for Enterprise deployment. If you are unfamiliar with the Worklog Assistant Configurator, it is a tool for Enterprise licensees to help them configure end-user desktops so that the end user only has to enter their username and passwords to start time tracking with JIRA.

I've been concentrating on performance improvements for Worklog Assistant, specifically when it comes to filters with hundreds of issues. Hopefully this will be done in the next week. As always, if you do have some suggestions, please let me know!

Finally, an interesting link I just came across from the JIRA mailing lists: Tempo. This might be of interest to people who are not happy with the time reports of JIRA when it comes to integrated billing.

Have a good week and happy time tracking!

If you are interested in some technical behind the scenes stuff

sohail@taggedtype.net (Sohail Somani) — Fri, 08 May 2009 04:00:00 +0000

Some tinkering went on today (link to my personal blog)