As a daily user of Sprintly, I was asked to give my top 5 tips on Sprintly.
The first thing I always try and explain to people is that Sprintly is different. It was developed by a software industry vet who was tired of products that manage projects based on the accuracy, or poor accuracy, of human estimates. With this being the case, my first bit of advice is to remember the core of Sprintly is different from most other project management software packages.
Now on to my top 5 tips for getting the most out of Sprintly!
Be Consistent
The first tip goes without saying when using any tool: Be consistent. Internally we use Sprintly as the source of truth for everything. Because of that we document everything in Sprintly and take a consistent approach. If I have a question about a feature that I am working on, I ask in Sprintly first. This will start a conversation in Sprintly that I can later go back to if I have a question, instead of asking questions in an IM chat where they could be lost.
Along with asking questions in Sprintly, we also have a consistent way of adding defect tickets into our system. As outlined earlier in our blog we discuss how we enter bugs in our system. You can read more about here. This is another way we keep all messaging and information in Sprintly consistent.
Tags
If you are not using tags in Sprintly, you are missing out on 50% of the awesomeness of the product. Tags can be used to track a multitude of things within the system. Tagging all items that belong to a feature will help you manage the expectations for that feature being deployed. You can also tag items that belong to a certain sprint to better plan each iteration of your development cycle. Also our tags power the Progress View. As I said earlier we don’t like rely on human estimation of time. Our Progress View and tag system work together to estimate for you. Make sure you tag items consistently and correctly, and this will help you in your planning!
Saving Filters (and filters in general)
We have a pretty robust filtering system, and because of this you can come up with some creative filtered views to help you get a better understanding of your data. When you build out a filter to any of the views in the system, you can save them by clicking on the star right below the running man. When you build the perfect filter view to track the tags you created, you can now save it for a consistent way to look at your data. You can also use those filters in the Report View to help build custom reports to share data outside of Sprintly.
Gear Menu
The Gear icon is located on each item card as you hover over their upper right corner. This is definitely a power user tool. In this menu are a lot of options to save project managers’ time. Within this menu you can make items skip steps, revert back into development and even delete them altogether. The other option found in this menu will even allow you to change non-story items to sub-items of stories. The gear icon is a handy tool when it comes time to clean up your Sprintly backlog.
GitHub Integration
To sum up my tips on things you need to use in order to become a Sprintly pro, the final one would be the GitHub Integration. GitHub is without a doubt the leader in online repo storage and management. We have a really great solution to help keep your engineers doing what they do best, and that’s writing code! Instead of having them managing tickets in a project management tool. Once the integration is setup on your account your engineers can mark Sprintly items at the same time they are submitting commits and pull requests to the source! This saves a lot of time and keeps the engineers building beautiful products. All an engineer has to do is simply write “Fixes item #32,” and Sprintly will mark that item done and put the comments from the engineer in the item. Everything remains consistent and documented.
With these 5 tips I think most teams can really get into a nice workflow with Sprintly. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to send our support team a note support@sprint.ly or say “Hi!” on Twitter! And as always, may your code compile with 0 errors!
