SCRUM ClubPublic Space

The Problems Assembla Solves

You may have noticed that the marketing on Assembla.com is a little rough and this workspace has a lot of features. That's one of the issues I am having writing up the marketing materials for this product... It has A LOT of features. And they are SMART. And INTEGRATED. It is a really big SOLUTION for the various chicken/egg pains of software development.

How do I take the following concepts and then present it in a marketing website? What do you even call it?

The Problems and Solutions

Chicken & Egg Syndrome BBQ Chicken Omlette
If the developers stop to document their work, they don't have time to get their work done. But if I don't document their work, I can't support what they build. If I can't support what they build, I need to restart development. Don't bother documenting their work. Make them write tickets for what they do so you know what they are working on and make comments everytime they commit code changes. Assembla keeps everything together so you get a usable record without a whole lot of effort.
Eventually I am going to have a lot of people leave my team, but when they go I lose all the knowledge around the system and what they built. But I can't afford to keep everyone. I'm literally hemhorraging intellectual property daily. Ok, that's a reality. At least if you use Assembla you get a "Day 1 and forever from there" record of everything related to your product. And it is only the useful stuff. If someone was on the wrong track, the workflow forces them to correct what was said/written, so when you do a keyword search a couple of years from now, you can turn up whatever they said and what the resolution was.
I need to have the developers be as comfortable as possible in their development environment, but I can't afford to pay them to set up a new development environment for every project, irregardless of what the tools cost.

We have a couple of tools called Preconfigured Spaces, Copy This Space, and Branded Portfolios. In and of themselves, they don't sound like much, right?

But here's how it works:

  1. You check our list of Preconfigured Spaces, and see if we have a space that matches what you want, or pick the closest thing to it (and then tell what you really want so that we can add it to our Product Backlog).
  2. You copy the Preconfigured Space to a new workspace that belongs to you.
  3. You then add whatever plugins and add-ons you need to.
  4. The next time a similar project comes up, you copy the space to a new space and start fresh.
  5. Hopefully you make your customization public so that other people can benefit. Or you manage it like a product and sell that to other Assembla users to recoup the costs of your customization.
My team is all over the place, no one is in the same office and communication is really hard. I get offers for work every day, but I have to turn it down because the infrastructure I have to support the business I already have is enough to handle. Plus, I would have to find a ton of people to staff the added business, then administrate the work, manage the hours, do the billing, manage the people, manage accounting and payroll, then roll them off again.

Assembla automates all that for you and supports doing it as either an in-house shop or third party vendor.

Plus you can do it from your mobile phone because the whole interface is CSS.

It takes a really long time to explain how it does all that. Just call me.
I've implemented tools like this before and had zero rate of success. A lot of money and time down the drain. There is always the cost of acquisition on anything. Assembla was written by developers for developers. If they are doing code control, bug reporting and status reports already, you aren't actually changing anything on them. We used open source tools they are already probably using and unified the data model. Then we replace the user management modules with ours. Finally we wrapped Assembla around them. Now we just keep repeating that until we have all the tools people are comfortable with.

My company is trying to get Scrum implemented as a process. I should probably use a tool that reinforces that process. I want the guidance and usefulness of something that matches what people are trying to learn.

But I don't want to have to go through a major implementation of a new Agile/Scrum tool... The cost of acquisition on a dedicated scrum tool is really, really high... It piggybacks:

  1. Learning a new tool
  2. Implementing a new tool
  3. Coordinating the use of a new tool across people, process and technology which is bad enough as it is
  4. Maintaining information in yet another location which adds to my project overhead
  5. Scrum and Agile tools are really complex and add a lot of vocabulary to my project when keeping up with the business vocabulary is hard enough as it is
  6. The developers code faster than I can update the project information in the tools so I end up slowing down development of the product as I work on the product backlog

Yeah... that is hard. There's a few things going on there.

  1. There's a gap between planning, development and QA... The agile/scrum tools we looked at for our work relied on QA guys to close the loop, which is how we ended up building Assembla.
  2. Agile and scrum can be done with post it notes and string. Why do we need really complicated software for a methodology that teaches people how to do their work using office supplies?
  3. The developers are required to learn how to do things they already know how to do just to use a tool with some process guidance.

Our system is all about integration, so we only had to add a couple of things to support scrum: A daily stand up report form and drag and drop ticketing so that you can use our Tickets tool like you are moving post it notes... But on a whiteboard that everyone in your workspace can see. What we are missing is the process guidance because... we already do it so it was second nature. We didn't need process guidance. We just do it.

People that didn't build the system need the process guidance... (They weren't there, they need to catch up!) So we are working on that right now.

We already have in place:

  • Watch a software team do scrum every day as a live "role model"
  • Page help
  • Mini-tutorials
  • Customer support forum
  • Live chat
  • (and maybe this workspace will end up being useful)

The following support will be available by the end of May 2008:

  • A video tutorial on how to do Scrum on Assembla
  • Step-by-step instruction worksheet
I need something I own, host and can customize to my process. Ok, you can buy a copy of the whole thing, host it yourself. The process customization is a matter of creating a preconfigured workspace and then copying it again and again. Probably some technical writing to set up some templates. Our app is semantic-smart and we don't fork our code releases, so as long as you follow our development guidelines you should be ok.

 

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