Sprint.ly: New software development management tool from Joe Stump

Got as far as the sign-up. I'm already skeptical because of all the other options available and I'm already pretty happy with what I'm using. When I saw that I had to enter a credit card during signup just to try the free period, I closed the browser tab.

Getting even just an email address from someone is very valuable. Why turn anyone away by requiring all this other stuff? Why not have the person simply enter an email address and then send a password via email or something? That's a 5 second sign-up process. Then you can have the user fill out the rest of the info during some sort of "getting started" process. Let the user fill in this info on his own interest in using the application (within the actual application.) Filling out a sign-up form is not interesting. It's more like a leap of faith that the application will be interesting enough for me when I get into it that it will reward me for the effort of going through the sign-up process.

Do you really have such a high volume of sign-ups that you have to do beta invites? I wonder if there is a better way to handle these things. Perhaps you could have a system where the feature gets auto-enabled as needed? My problem with beta invites is that for most services, by the time I receive the invite, I have forgotten what the invite was for and I ignore the email.

ETA: Look how scrumy.com does their process of getting a user from using the app to sign-up. Maybe not perfect, but far better than most I have seen.

Looks nice, but it still leaves me with the same feeling as most other tools like this: any co-located team is better off with just whiteboards, cards and sticky notes.

Plus most of these tools are geared towards the structured initial development phase, and become considerably less usable once a product is live and goes into maintenance mode. This is odd, since the major part of a projects lifespan consists of maintenance, not development.

The one great missing online tool IMO is one that both integrates and separates the way the user experiences issues (like via Zendesk) and the way those issues are split up, prioritized and handled by developers (any known issue tracking system like Redmine etc).

Right now, every team I know either uses two systems in which the relationship is handled manually (and thus labor intensive and prone to errors) or one system that is only geared towards either audience.

I didn't watch the whole video because it completely fails to describe the workflow. What I'm really interested in: how would Sprint.ly solve/represent this workflow:

1. Customer reports a defect

2. Programmer figures out there are two tasks that needs to be done by different people (in different places). One task depend on the other.

3. The first task is solved. How does the other person know to start?

4. The second task is re-assigned and then solved.

Actually, it doesn't have to be this complex. But at least have that in mind when showing your product; all todo-applications can tackle the easy stuff, it's when the more complex use-cases appear that most of them fall apart.

And when you say "make it possible for everyone to participate" I hear "no way to figure out what you need to do". Although it's good to have a place to see everything, I'm more often interested in only what I need to participate in. Show us that please!

I know it sounds crazy, but I'd love a free option. A 1 person project doesn't make a lot of sense in any case other than as a test for the product. From that view, a free option doesn't seem like a big deal. I think of it like having a racing bike I can't take out of the house. I can see all that it does, try it out, but to really use it I'll get a paid account.

It's beautiful, the video is great, but I don't see myself using this instead of the other thousands of project management tools. What does it do differently? In what will it make my life easier? Is it for developers or managers (or everyone..?) Basically, why should I use this instead of trello or asana? (To name only 2 out of 1000 project management tools).

The site itself is light on details, but the video provides an excellent overview of the product. I especially like the minimap and the mad lib-style issue reporting.

First, I want to say that it looks like a lot of work went into this and it looks well done, complete with the cheery wide-eyed demo video.

However, do we really need yet another task management tool?

http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/12/tyranny-of-th...

When Pivotal first launched they had a free version for a while before started to switching pricing. Now, I understand there is a big no-no about raising the price later. However, I think there is a world where they can offer:

A - personal free accounts. Or free account for team of < 2.

B - announce the price but provide a 6-9 mont grace period just so they can get a nice momentum.

Now, they might be charging from the get go for fundraising reasons. Basically so they can go to investors and say: look we got X number of real paying customers in Y months. Which makes a real good case for getting investors.

That said, I love the UI. But I wont invest anytime on it yet, unless I know I can use it for free for a few months, or if there is strong social value that proves it can really help projects and requirement gathering process.

I often joke (with myself since I'm sad that way) that everyone must at some point make a productivity web-app. It's nice that Joe has made one that fixes a few things that annoy me about most.

Most are targeted at engineers first (Pivotal), at visually oriented organizers (Trello) or adapted for the specific team that wrote it's methods (like Thoughtbot's).

Luckily I'm at the "tool choice" stage of a new venture so I won't give my team whiplash by trying this one out. If it integrates with Campfire it'd be perfect.

Hey guys, looking forward to seeing the comments. Go easy on Graham, though, he's the sensitive type. ;)

Looks interesting Joe. Any chance you'll offer team pricing? Per seat pricing quickly runs away in cost compared to alternatives.

Is there a good text-based description? Not really interested in sitting through another cutesy startup video.

I got a bit distracted after I realized I recognized the voice in the video, but it looks like a nice project management tool. I wish there was more information about estimation though.

Right now, we use Pivotal and the lack of estimation on tasks makes it an incomplete offering. We estimate feature, but that is a fairly rough estimate used for longer-term prediction. It isn't until we break things down into tasks that people really understand how long it is going to take. Just having to estimate hours gets people to really think things through.

Given that half of project management is about predicting completion dates and judging risk of slippage, I'd say estimation is absolutely required.

We've recently tried apptrajectory.com but they are iterating in a different direction from what we want (e.g. Stories are finished then delivered then accepted)

sprint.ly looks like it is a lot closer to our workflow.

I bailed halfway through the intro video. There was nothing wrong. It looks great. I'm just so very jaded about anything purported to manage... anything. Especially in a web app.

The demo video should tell a story. "John has a donut company and is having trouble keeping track of his team's tasks..."

Instead, it's literally a feature list.

Estimation is an important feature.

1) by story points for team effort

2) by story points for business value

3) by hours for work to be completed in the current "iteration"

We like to say development is a marathon, not a sprint.

http://www.kanbanpad.com - Had to :).

P.s nice site design.

Would you consider perhaps a feature set or details as to what it does that doesn't require me to sit through a video?

Would like to sign-up but it asked me for a Beta Invite Code and I don't have one. Can someone please send me one?

I'd really like to try this. How can I get an invite code? How far out are you from sending more?

Looks gorgeous, what framework(s) is this implemented with?