Luckily, DoneDone makes it easy to create and update issues directly from your inbox.

Creating issues via email

First, you’ll need your DoneDone project’s unique email address. You can find this by visiting your project’s dashboard, then navigating to Project Settings.

Project Settings is available inside the Manage Project dropdown

Locate the Create Issues via Email section to find your project’s email address.  This will be in the format: add-issue-####@mydonedone.com.

Next, open your email client and start composing a new email to your project email address. Use the following guide to create your message:

• Email subject field: Enter the new issue’s title here.
• First line of email body: Email address of the user who should be assigned as Fixer.  The user must have a DoneDone account with access to the project.
• Second line: Priority of the issue (Low, Medium, High, or Critical).
• Remaining lines: Description of the issue.

You can see an example here: http://www.getdonedone.com/faq/#emailing-issues

Updating existing issues via email

Each time an update is made to one of your issues, you’ll receive an email notification. Simply reply to this email to add a comment. Plus, if you add attachments, they’ll automatically be added to the original issue in DoneDone.

Don’t be a stranger

If you’re a fan of managing your work with your inbox, do the same with us and send us an email! You can also see what we’re up to on Twitter (@getdonedone).

The post Creating and updating issues via email appeared first on DoneDone.

If you use Github webhooks to update issues, there’s a quick change you’ll need to make for the time being.  Otherwise, the Github post-receive hook will time out. After you’ve added the DoneDone web hook to your Github repository, you need to make a modification to add an “ssl_version” key to the hook config via cURL.

Github doesn’t have a way to do this through their web UI, so you need to do it through cURL. Here are the two steps you need to take. I just do it through my terminal in Mac.

There are four things you’ll need to replace in the cURL syntax below:

• <github-username>: Replace with your Github username
• <donedone-webhook-url>: Replace with your DoneDone webhook URL, found on the integrations page of your project
• <github-repository>: Replace with the name of your Github repository
• <github-hookid>: In Step 2, replace with the ID for this hook you found in Step 1

Step 1: Get the Github Hook ID via cURL

Open up your terminal, and enter the following to get a list of your hooks for the repository you’ve integrated:

curl -u "<github-username>" https://api.github.com/repos/<github-username>/<github-repository>/hooks

Hit ENTER, then enter your Github password. From the JSON response, make a note of the “id” that matches your DoneDone hook. You’ll use that in the final step below.

Step 2: Update the “config” value for your Github Hook via cURL

Next enter the following to update your web hook configuration:

curl -u "<github-username>" -X PATCH --data '{"config":{"url": "<donedone-webhook-url>","content_type":"form","insecure_ssl":"1","ssl_version":"3"}}' https://api.github.com/repos/<github-username>/<github-repository>/hooks/<github-id-of-hook>

Hit ENTER, then enter your Github password. You should be all set!

We hope to have a fix in place soon so that you will not need to go through these extra steps.

The post Github timeouts and the quick and dirty solution appeared first on DoneDone.

Your company probably didn’t have quite that much activity (if you did, let me refer you to our Max plan), but it can still be a challenge to keep track of all the issues your team is working on. Sometimes you want to see everything that’s in progress, and sometimes you want to see issues that have already been fixed or closed. Here at DoneDone, we’ll often want to group several projects together, or see which issues are in progress for a specific team member.

Luckily, DoneDone’s dashboard filters give you a super-simple way to view your issues by status, priority, project, and more.

The Filter Menu

At the top left of each dashboard page, you’ll find a dropdown that displays the filter you’re currently viewing. Click the dropdown to display a list of popular filters and custom filters.

The DoneDone Filter menu

Popular Filters

Popular filters are DoneDone’s most-used filters, and cover most needs:

• All your issues: All issues where you are assigned as Fixer or Tester, or are cc’d
• Your active issues: Issues where you are the Fixer or Tester, or are cc’d, and the status is not Closed or Fixed
• Issues waiting on you: Issues where you are the Fixer or Tester, and your input is needed for the issue to move to the next step
• Issues waiting on them: Issues where you are the Fixer or Tester, and another user’s input is needed for the issue to move to the next step
• Issues you’re cc’d on: Issues where you are in the CC notification list
• All issues: All issues to which you have access to
• All active issues: All issues where the status is not Closed or Fixed
• All closed and fixed issues: All issues where the status is Closed or Fixed

Custom Filters

Custom filters are defined by you – you can create filters to show issues matching the following criteria:

• Project
• Tester
• Fixer
• Tags
• Priority
• Status
• Created Date
• Last Updated Date

Filters can be created at the global (all projects) level, or within individual project dashboards.

Refining Filter Results

Once you’ve selected a filter, you can make your results even more specific by using the additional dropdown controls to the right of the filter selection.

• Tagged: Only show issues that have one or more tags
• Due Date: Only show issues that are overdue or due anytime, today, or in a specific date range
• Sort: Sort the resulting issues by Last Updated Date, Due Date, Issue Number, Project Title, Priority, Status, Fixer, or Tester
• Date Range (Activity Dashboard only): Only show issue activity between two specific dates

Persist Your Criteria

After selecting a filter and refining or sorting your results, your criteria will be auto-selected on all three dashboard pages. So don’t worry about getting your issue list just right, navigating to a detail page, and having all your work reset when you come back to the dashboard. Everything will be just how you left it! Your filter selections will also persist between browsers – so you can view DoneDone on your phone or tablet and pick up right where you left off from your office desktop.

Questions or Suggestions?

We always love to hear suggestions from DoneDone users, and we’re always available to answer questions. Just chat us up over email or Twitter (@getdonedone)!

The post Slice & dice your issues with dashboard filters appeared first on DoneDone.

At We Are Mammoth, we’ve been using HipChat for nearly a year and I can’t imagine working without it. Our 20 person shop is spread across five states, with a few people working from home every day. HipChat keeps our team together.  At times, I don’t know whether the person I’m chatting with is upstairs or working at home. It makes remote working feel completely connected.

A lot of our day is spent resolving bugs in DoneDone. Sometimes, when issues need more back and forth, we resolve them with a face-to-face regroup or HipChat discussion. So — we thought — why not bring DoneDone into HipChat already?

So we did. You can now connect any DoneDone project to a HipChat room. You can even connect multiple DoneDone projects to a single HipChat room. Whenever anyone creates issues, updates issues, or sends out a release build, you’ll get notified in your HipChat room.

A HipChat message is posted each time you create an issue

We paid particular attention to color as well.  Fixed issues are marked with a green background and those not confirmed as Fixed are marked with red.  For release builds, we used purple because, well, that’s the only other choice we had.

Green messages for fixed issues, red messages for the not-so-fixed

Your HipChat room will notify you when a release build has been made

Integrate your DoneDone project to a HipChat room in the next minute

If you’re an admin in DoneDone, simply go to a project homepage and select Integrations from the “Manage this Project” dropdown on the right. From the Integrations page, select the HipChat box. Finally, paste in your HipChat API key and DoneDone will pull in all the available rooms you can link up to your project. That’s it!  You can remove HipChat just as simply, by clicking the “Remove HipChat” button.

We’ve made HipChat integration a snap.

We think HipChat integration will work great for a number of reasons:

• First, it provides a quick digest of what’s going on with your project, much like the Activities page does.  This is great for project managers who want to get a general sense of what’s going on in DoneDone without logging in.
• Second, it creates another forum to discuss issues.  If you need the flexibility of huddling on issues as a larger group, or just want to get something solved quickly in real-time, HipChat is a great place to do it.
• Finally, HipChat integration marks just another way to get issues out of your inbox.  You can disable email notifications in your Project Settings, and use HipChat to be alerted on updates.

We’re excited to see this launched and how it might change the way you work with DoneDone. Let us know how you’re using HipChat. Tweet us at @getdonedone, or email us directly.

The post Y u no use HipChat integration? appeared first on DoneDone.

Integrate a DoneDone project with your repository

Login to DoneDone and navigate to one of your project dashboards (when viewing the ‘All Projects’ dashboard, simply click on any project name, or click the dashboard title dropdown and select your project from the shortcut list). Then click the Project Settings icon and choose Git & SVN integration.

This page displays all the information you’ll need to connect DoneDone to your source code repository.

GitHub

Scroll down to the GitHub section and find your GitHub integration URL. All you’ll need to do is login to your GitHub account, choose your repository, add a Post-Receive webhook, and paste this URL.

Beanstalk

Locate the Beanstalk section and find your Beanstalk integration URL. Then simply login to your Beanstalk account, choose your repository, add a Web Hook, and paste this URL.

Bitbucket

Find the Bitbucket section, which contains 4 settings values. Login to your Bitbucket account, choose your repository, and navigate to Repository Details > Services. Add the DoneDone service and paste the values from DoneDone.

Committing Changes

Once you’ve connected DoneDone to your repository, you can easily update DoneDone issues by including data in your commit messages. Here’s an example:

Fixed a CSS bug on the login form
[#15 status:Ready For Retest]

This will add the commit message as a comment to DoneDone issue #15, and will set the issue’s status to Ready for Retest. You can find more commit examples on our Subversion & Git Integration help page.

Let us know how your version control integration goes! Tweet us at @getdonedone, or email us directly.

The post Using DoneDone with GitHub, Beanstalk, and Bitbucket appeared first on DoneDone.

While DoneDone already gives you a number of options to mine through your issues — either through popular filters like “Issues waiting on you”, or by drilling down a particular status, due date, fixer, tester, or priority — sometimes those just aren’t the quickest routes to find exactly what you want.

Sometimes, you’re looking for “that issue where Craig uploaded that Balsamiq PDF revision” or the one where “Jen was talking about using Chrome frame on IE6.” You know something very specific about the issue, but don’t quite remember what it was called…or how it was tagged…or when it was due.  Before search, there wasn’t an obvious way to go about finding this issue. This is where DoneDone’s global search really helps.

Give global search a spin

Click the search icon on the upper-right corner of your DoneDone account to get started:

Click the magnifying glass on the upper-right corner to start your search

Type in any words or phrases into the global search field, and you’ll get a list of all issues that contain those terms. You’ll even see your matching search terms highlighted in context. DoneDone will search all content within an issue, including…

• All issue titles
• All issue descriptions
• All comments made on your issues
• All file attachment names  (Great for finding “that issue with that one Balsamiq PDF!”)

In addition, the search results page will also show you a list of projects that have these matching terms. So, if your list of issues is still too big, simply drill down to a specific project.

Search results highlight matching terms, including relevant file attachment names.

In addition, if you click into any issue, DoneDone will send you right to the specific comment that contained your matching search term.  You can also use the “Previous” and “Next” links to cycle through all other matching issues in your search. Also, if you’re inside of a single project, you can still use the global search to quickly navigate to a specific issue number. For example, just type #124 to get right to issue #124.

DoneDone global search vs. the rest of the field

We wanted our global search to be the best issue tracking search on the market.  Here’s a few things you’ll get with search that you won’t find with bug trackers like FogBugz, Lighthouse, or Sifter. DoneDone’s global search…

• Displays the search results in context for issue titles, descriptions and any comments.
• Scans file attachment names, not just titles, descriptions and comments.
• Links you right to a specific comment on an issue’s history thread.  You won’t have to sift through a long chain of replies to figure out where the matching search term is.

We’re ecstatic to finally get global search out of development and into your hands.  Let us know how your searching goes by messaging us @getdonedone, or emailing us directly.

The post Find those hard-to-find issues with global search appeared first on DoneDone.

DoneDone makes it quick and easy to invite new users to your projects, organize them into companies, and update their permissions. It’s also a snap for users to share and update their contact information with coworkers.

Managing companies & people on your account

Companies and people can be added, updated, and removed from the Companies & People link in the DoneDone header. Please note that you’ll need to be logged in as an Administrator in order to access this section.

The Companies & People page allows you to quickly add, update, and delete companies and users on your account

Managing Companies

Users are organized into companies, and each user must belong to a company. When you first sign up, you’ll start with a single company (which you provided when you created your account). To add a new company, just click the Create New Company button in the sidebar. You can rename a company at any time by clicking its name on the Companies & People page, or delete a company by clicking its Delete icon.

Adding People

To add new users to your DoneDone account, visit the Companies & People page, select the appropriate Company from the dropdown list, and click the Add People link.

You’ll just need to enter the first name, last name, and email address in order to invite someone to your DoneDone account. Click Add another person to display a new row, and enter as many users as you’d like to invite.

Importing users from Basecamp - If you use Basecamp for project management, you can also simply click the Get them from Basecamp… link to import one or more logins from your Basecamp account. DoneDone supports both Basecamp and Basecamp Classic.

Once you’ve entered your users’ names and email addresses, use the Project Access section to grant the new users permission to your projects. When finished, click Create these people, and the users you entered will receive a DoneDone invitation email.

Adding users and assigning permissions

Resending login information

From time to time, a user may forget their username or password. When viewing the Companies & People page, just locate the user and click the Resend login information icon. Users can also send this information to themselves by clicking Forgot your username or password? on the DoneDone login screen.

Editing and deleting people

You can update any user’s details and permissions by clicking the Edit icon on the Companies & People page. You can also delete a user with the Delete icon (you’ll be prompted to reassign all their issues to another user).

Managing project permissions

You can easily update users assigned to a project by navigating to the project’s dashboard page, clicking the Manage Project icon, and choosing Companies & People.

Updating permissions within a project

Feedback?

How is DoneDone working for you and your users? Send us your feedback via email or Twitter (@getdonedone).

The post Working with companies & people appeared first on DoneDone.

Consider the following situation:

Project ABC is managed by Dwight, who has customized his issue workflow to use the following statuses: Submitted, Verified, Cannot Reproduce, Will Not Fix, Resolved, and Awaiting Manager Approval. Dwight’s developers have been using this workflow for several months.

Project XYZ is kicked off, and managed by Jim. Jim prefers a much simpler workflow, so he defines his statuses as Not Started, Started, and Finished. Half of Bob’s developers now split time between Project ABC and Project XYZ.

Before the new project began, these developers used a single list of familiar statuses. Now, however, they have to pause and think before logging or updating an issue. “I’m on Project XYZ, so I need to choose Started instead of Verified. OK, it’s been a few weeks since I’ve worked in Project ABC – should I mark this ticket as Finished, Resolved, or does this one require manager approval?”

As your team grows, your new additions will have their own opinions on how issue workflows should be defined. A savvy CEO’s solution to this would be simple: define a standard workflow that will work in most cases, and require all projects to use it. This is exactly what we’ve implemented in DoneDone.

Issue statuses

An issue will move between 11 statuses throughout its life:

• Open – The issue has been created.
• In Progress – The Fixer has acknowledged the issue, and has begun working on a fix.
• Not an Issue – The Fixer has determined that the issue is expected or by design.
• Not Reproducible – The Fixer cannot recreate the issue as described.
• Missing Information – The Fixer needs more details to complete the fix.
• Pushed Back – The Fixer had previously marked the issue as Not An Issue, Not Reproducible, or Missing Information. The Tester has now provided more details, and wants the Fixer to take another look.
• Ready for Next Release – The Fixer has resolved the issue, but does not want the Tester to be notified yet. Instead, the issue will be added to a Release – a collection of issues that should all be tested at once. When a project administrator creates a Release Build, the Testers of all the issues will be asked to confirm their issues’ fixes.
• Ready for Retest – The Fixer has resolved the issue, and wants the Tester to confirm that the fix also works for them.
• Fix Not Confirmed – The Tester has tried the fix, but the issue is still unresolved.
• Fixed – The Tester has tried the fix, and it has correctly resolved the issue.
• Closed – The issue should no longer be worked on.

The issue workflow

While there are a lot of statuses listed above, DoneDone only shows users the statuses that make sense at any given time. Users will only see a small number of options based on their role and the issue’s current status.

For example, if an issue is Ready for Retest, the Tester can only change the status to Fixed or Not Fixed. If the Fixer changes their mind, they can switch the status back to In Progress, Not an Issue, Missing Information, etc.

Overriding the workflow

Of course, there will always be situations where you need to directly set an issue’s status, regardless of its current state in the workflow. Users can always use the Edit icon to manually change an issue’s status, or use the Bulk Edit feature to change the status of multiple issues at once.

Keep it simple

We think DoneDone’s status workflow is a good fit for just about any project – and most of our users have agreed. In fact, we’ve been using the same list of statuses since DoneDone v1 in 2009.

Has DoneDone’s simple status workflow been good to you? Let us know via email or Twitter (@getdonedone).

The post DoneDone’s workflow and issue statuses appeared first on DoneDone.

Sifter’s simple approach mirrors what we believe too: one-to-one communication on issues, and a strict set of issue statuses that drive how issues get resolved.  However, there are a few features that DoneDone offers which differ from Sifter’s.  If you’re on the hunt for a simple issue tracker, consider a few features we offer that Sifter currently doesn’t support.

Markdown Support

Sifter currently does not offer any text formatting options.  We agree that a full-blown rich text editor can sometimes do more harm than good.  Instead, we simply support Markdown formatting. What we like about Markdown is that it’s unobtrusive for people who don’t want to use it. As opposed to a gaudy text editor, you don’t have to use Markdown if you don’t want – just keep typing. Plus, learning the basics, like bold (**bold**), italic (*italic*) and bullet points, only takes a few minutes to get the hang of, and it makes a world of difference for an issue’s readability:

Our simple Markdown formatting structure to produce bold, italics, and bulleting…

…looks like this when an issue is saved.

Code Formatting

Another huge benefit of Markdown is support for code markup. The vast majority of DoneDone customers use us in conjunction with web site and software projects. With DoneDone, you can produce a code block by indenting every line of the block by at least 4 spaces or 1 tab.  This goes a long way to making bug resolution for software projects that much easier. There’s no need to attach code files when you can easily show the markup in the issue itself.

Code formatting in DoneDone issue descriptions and comments

Tagging

Sifter doesn’t support tags — they are ”messy, inaccurate, and error-prone.”  However, we believe tagging can be incredibly flexible without sacrificing simplicity.  It all depends on how you use them.

For instance, at We Are Mammoth, we use tags to categorize bugs by discipline (e.g. UI, UX, backend). This lets us quickly gauge where our time needs to be spent.  In addition, DoneDone tags come with auto-hinting, to avoid misspelling tags that should be the same thing.  For a long while, we also used tags to assign issues to a specific release (e.g. 2/28 release).  I still prefer to tag things this way, but customers can now use due dates to specifically assign dates to issues, and then view overdue or upcoming issues in their lists.

DoneDone suggests matches based on previously created tags within a project

Attachments via email

Sifter doesn’t allow email attachments, stating it is impossible for them to distinguish between actual email image signatures vs. attachments.  We agree, those are difficult to parse through (and we don’t try to), but the advantage of being able to send full issues through email with included attachments outweighs those potential false positives.  Plus, for DoneDoner’s who frequently create issues by email, it’s a simple fix to disable your image signatures when creating issues.

Time tracking with Harvest

We fully agree with Sifter’s stance that we are not in the business of tracking time.  That’s why we’ve integrated with Harvest so that you can simultaneously track time and work on issues within DoneDone.  While we aren’t in the business of time tracking, having an easy way to log the time you are spending in DoneDone is important to us.

Track your time directly within a DoneDone issue

Edit issues in bulk

Sifter does not support bulk issue edits.  For our customers, this is an essential feature.  With DoneDone, you can take any list of issues and edit the fixer, tester, priority level, due date, or status at once.  You can also migrate a group of issues from one project to another.  We’ve found this last feature to be particularly popular.  Lots of times you’ll start logging issues within a new project and later realize that you’d prefer to break them out separately due to billing or organizational reasons.  Rather than painstakingly go through items one-by-one, bulk edits let you do this with one button click.

Send us your feedback

That’s it! Just a few ways we think DoneDone picks up where Sifter leaves off.  We think these are critical differences in our philosophies that might help you make a decision on which bug or issue tracker to use. If you’re ready to give DoneDone a try, signup free for 30 days!

We love hearing from our customers too. Email us or send us a message on Twitter (@getdonedone).

The post DoneDone picks up where Sifter left off appeared first on DoneDone.

We first launched interactive reports last year with the New DoneDone, and since then we’ve worked with many of our users to continually refine the user interface to make it simpler, faster, and just plain better.

Start with a filter

The Reports dashboard works just like the Issue List and Activity views – you begin by selecting which types of issues you want to examine, such as issues waiting on you, issues with a specific tag, or overdue issues. You’ll get a chart that breaks down all the issues matching your criteria.

All my issues, grouped by project

Choose a category, then start drilling

Use the chart category dropdown to quickly redraw the chart so that issues are grouped by project, status, priority, fixer, or tester. Click on any chart segment to drill into a specific sub-category.

Drilling into all my open issues within a single project, grouped by priority

A simple way to perform complex analysis

The chart drilldown system is a powerful way to chain together complex queries. It’s easy to quickly visualize how your issues are distributed from many different angles. Plus, the navigation trail makes it easy to move up or down your query with a single click.

Move up and down your report groupings one click at a time

See the underlying data as you work

Visualizations are great, but there’s always a point where you need to see a list of the issues that make up your current chart view. Lucky for you, there’s a quick toggle icon that allows you to instantly switch between a chart and its underlying list of issues.

Instantly toggle between a chart and its underlying issues

Let’s make reporting even better

We already have some ideas on how to improve DoneDone’s reporting features in the future, but we’d love to know your thoughts. Tell us what you’d like to see in your reports via email or Twitter (@getdonedone).

The post Visualize your issues with reports appeared first on DoneDone.