Wolox’s Internal Apps
At Wolox we use Github and Trello as key tools for the software development process. Github is used to host our code repositories and to make code reviews using pull requests in order to guarantee code quality and reduce bugs. The other app, Trello, is used to communicate the development progress to the whole team and to the client.
How we use Trello
The Trello cards, that represent features to be developed, are distributed in the different columns to show the progress of the task:
Each project has the same type of columns from which cards are moved showing in which stage is each task. The criteria for relocating the cards is identical for the whole team.
Example
When a sprint starts, cards are moved from Backlog to On Going Sprint. Every time a developer starts implementing a feature, he assigns the card to himself and moves the card to Doing. The process continues and when the card gets to Production, it’s considered as resolved.
After several months and sprints using these apps and changing our development process according to our needs, we realized that lots of information could be retrieved from Trello. This data could help us improve the way we do things and make the client happier. That was the moment in which we started developing Wolox Stats.
See also: Four Reasons Why Rails Rocks at Wolox!
Wolox Stats
We developed a web application using Trello Webhooks. Now every time an action is made on a Wolox Trello board (e.g. a new card is created, moved or commented), we are able to save that data and use it to display information from the different projects. Some statistics that we can display filtered by date range are:
- Number of cards resolved
- Number of cards rejected by the clients
- Hot Fixes created
- Average time spent on each card to get to Production
Also, having a hook to the actions in Trello allows us to generate notifications every time some important actions occur:
- A Hot Fix has been created
- A card has not been estimated in the actual sprint
- A new sprint has started
Finally, we can also display real time information about sprints progress, time spent in a sprint and time remaining according to an initial sprint estimation.
The statistics mentioned above help us knowing how our people work and with this, we can identify issues that appear frequently in different projects as well as other relevant information for the Wolox software development process.
Wolox Releases
This is another internal application that we developed to help us create a new release every time a sprint finishes. We use this web application every time a Product Owner (PO) thinks that a new release version can be deployed. It uses the Trello API to list the project’s board cards. The PO selects the cards that are part of the release and after submitting them, an email will be sent to the client notifying about the new features, and finally a Github Release will be made in the project branch selected and will list its cards in a pretty format.
In Wolox we are constantly searching for new technologies and ways to make our people and the client’s life easier, and we think that automating processes is a good way to approach that!
Posted by Esteban Pintos (esteban.pintos@wolox.com.ar)
