The main data object at Sprint.ly is the item. This is the core unit of collaboration in our software. All comments, code commits, etc. all map back, in some way, to an item. Items in Sprint.ly are usually well represented throughout the organization. You might chat about them in your Campfire or HipChat. Your Jenkins environment likely double checks your work against them. You get the idea.
Until now, however, there wasn’t an easy way to link these other representations of your Sprint.ly items back into Sprint.ly. Often times they are lost due to their ephemeral nature or, worse, the email alerts aren’t going to the entire team working on the item.
Today we’re happy to introduce a simple and flexible way to integrate these external events related to Sprint.ly items directly into Sprint.ly: item annotations.
What is an item annotation? It is an external event related to an item that is comprised of a user, a label, an action, and a free-form Markdown body. Once an item annotation is posted to the API two things happen:
- It is added to that item’s activity feed.
- The entire item’s team is alerted to the new annotation.
Here’s a peak at what a Jenkins bot might post back to an items referenced in commits that ended up breaking the build.
You can think of item annotations as a mini alert system so that actions in external systems that affect your items are surfaced to people working on those items. We’re excited to see what kinds of integrations people come up with.
