Assembla FAQ and Documentation

Assembla allows teams to communicate in a shared workspace. Workspaces that house ongoing work and have contained a team for a while will likely have a lot of information. Taking a quick look through the workspace can provide you with a good overview of everything that’s going on in terms of work and topics of discussion.

There will always be information about how work gets done that doesn’t make it into any tool anywhere… Generally it is the “people” side of working with a tool.Here are some good questions to ask the person that invited you to the workspace to get a little background on how your new team is using Assembla.

What is the history of the workspace?

Assembla allows workspace owners to delete old information. However, people get busy and old information isn’t always cleaned up. Ask the person who invited you how the workspace originated and whether all the information is up-to-date.

Alternately, the team may have moved to Assembla but never migrated the old information. There may be artifacts in places other than Assembla. Your workspace owner will know what is relevant and may be useful.

Are there other workspaces related to the one you were invited to?

Depending on what the project and company policy is, you may have been invited to a workspace that only contains “need to know” information to complete the work. There may be information in other workspaces, but for security or privacy reasons you were not added to that space. Talk to your manager if you are looking for information/files and don’t see them in the space.Your manager may add you to the space that contains the files or repost them in your workspace for you to access.

What are the dates and deadlines?

Assembla organizes dates and deadlines by milestone. How the term “milestone” is used varies from company to company. It is important to understand how Assembla milestones work when you look at dates and deadlines for a project.

Some companies define milestones as significant dates for the project, like the signing of a project charter or when a goal is reached. On Gaant charts project milestones are assigned to tasks linked by dependencies and scheduled. When a specific task is reached, a milestone is achieved.

Assembla milestones support Agile and Scrum processes for software development, which are iterative processes. Each task builds on previous tasks. Tasks (represented as tickets) are determined by the product owner’s vision for the product. Tickets can also originate from bug fix requests. Each Assembla milestone is a work package that contains tickets. A milestone can represent a sprint, product release or a client deliverable based on the work at hand. A workspace owner takes the tickets and adds them to each milestone based on what is achievable within the milestone.

Understanding the structure of how milestones are identified in the workspace makes ramp up a lot easier. Talk to your workspace owner about what each milestone represents and how the work is allotted to it.

How will your work be represented?

We recommend working from tickets.  You can assign yourself tickets, or the project manager may assign tickets.  You can post questions and ideas in the ticket comments.

But most projects related to software aren’t software development projects. There is marketing, sales, customer support, training, delivery and implementation work to be done, all of which add to and derive from software development work. These departments probably aren’t currently running Agile or Scrum processes, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t. Agile and Scrum classes are taught with project examples that don’t involve software development… like producing a music album, publishing a magazine, building a house, etc.

If you work in an adjacent position or department, talk to the workspace owner about how to represent your work in terms of the milestones. There may be key trigger tasks that can be represented in a ticket, or a separate sprint can be set up to track related project work that is not on the critical path.

What work is assigned to you?

When tasks are assigned to you, they are displayed on your My Start page under My Tickets. This is your personal To Do list across all workspaces of which you are a member.

How does the workspace owner want you to do status reporting?

Assembla offers a number of ways to do status reporting. Some reports may be informal, like a daily chat session. Others might be more formal like a Scrum report. How status is reported is based on the policies and preferences of the company and workspace owner.

Where is the code?

If you are working with a software project on Assembla, the code repository is likely to be on our host, but some teams migrate their people to Assembla before they migrate their code. Check with your workspace owner to find out where the code is hosted. The team may also be using Assembla as a development environment.

Is outside information entering the workspace?

Some companies find creative ways to use our workspaces. Customer emails may be redirected to a workspace and posted to the flow, allowing customer service representatives to handle incoming emails and manage them like cases. Help desk queries may post tickets.

Assembla allows developers to setup systems to exchange data with a workspace via our API.