April Update
Hello there! Nat Bennett here, with your monthly developer update from StoryTime.
Community notice: you have ~1 day (April 30th) left to get your data out of Pivotal Tracker.
We highly suggest using this dedicated exporter tool that leverages the Tracker API without locking you into a new tool. Kudos to Jan Friedensreich for making it.
https://lanes.pm/export
This Past Month
One of our goals for Storytime is to really nail story creation workflows. We want to make it easy to create stories, and cheap to delete them. “If it’s important, it’ll come back” is one of our mottos.
We’re also learning, both from our own experience and from user research, that different members of product teams approach story creation differently. Engineers often create stories one at a time, as they notice bugs, or recognize technical improvements are too large to do as part of the current stories. Product Managers tend to write stories in batches.
We want to build dedicated workflows for continuous learning, story creation, and management. The first of these is a concept we’re calling drafts.
Instead of starting in the backlog by default, stories will first show up in the drafts section. Then you’ll drag them into the implementation backlog (or another “stack” 😉 — more on stacks soon!) If you’re familiar with Pivotal Tracker’s “icebox” this will feel similar — especially at first, when we don’t yet have workflows built to handle the other functions iceboxes tend to pick up.
This month has mainly been behind-the-scenes changes to handle the concept that stories, aka: “the work”, might live somewhere other than the backlog, but we did just ship the first visible piece of drafts — a second column dedicated exclusively to writing stories.
Now story entry is always immediately accessible, even if you’re working with a deep backlog. If you’re in the Alpha group, let us know what you think.
Responsive design for story cards!
Open stories no longer look quite so goofy on mobile. They still look kind of goofy! I apologize deeply for the padding around those state buttons. (Designer note: I too apologize. We are diving deep on this now.)
We have a goal to make story-writing-reading-editing as intuitive as possible. There’s an opportunity to revisit what is truly essential in the experience as well as experiment with functionality that wasn’t quite as feasible 10+ years ago as it is today.
Up Next
Finishing drafts. New stories will appear in the drafts column, and then you’ll drag them into the backlog at the correct location.
Performance investigations. In relatively large backlogs like the StoryTime backlog itself, we’ve been seeing what should be simple interface operations like opening and closing stories, or changing story state, take up to several seconds. I’m not sure if this is something goofy we’re doing in the database, network lag, an issue with our host, or something weirder.
More soon —
Nat & the StoryTime team