How Uclusion helps developers
Job management means focussing on the completion of a small unit of work (not necessarily deliverable by itself) instead of a project or theme. Choose the right job to taken on next by creating it, inspecting the backlog, or, if more than one person, getting approval certainty. Then fill the job with the tasks, suggestions, questions, blocking issues, and reviews necessary to finish.
Solo developer
When working solo, the job status tab tells you everything you need to know to start coding.
Above I can see that I have a job in the Marketing view with a task in progress. I can also see
that I expected to finish this job in 2 days and that the “Demo backend issues” job has been in
ready to assign backlog for over a month.
There are a number of jobs completed in the last 3 weeks (configurable) in Tasks Complete and if I add a new task to one of them it will automatically move back to Work Ready.
If I need to make a note on the go I use the mobile interface (PWA). I can also easily open a critical level bug, paste in a screenshot, and fix the bug or move it inside a job later.
The not ready backlog and normal and minor bugs are an easy way to organize jobs and bugs that are not a priority - particularly since each view has its own status and backlog.
All of this comes opinionated with no setup of job stages, layout, or logic. Every detail to make developer planning easier comes out of the box:
- job names are derived from descriptions
- the navigation arrow or its keystroke automatically goes to an in progress task or cycles through Work Ready jobs
- adding a question or suggestion to a job automatically changes its status to appear in Next / Assistance
- drag and drop, context menus, and simple choice driven wizards guide all actions
- putting a task or subtask in progress prompts for removing any existing in progress
- a notification is sent when a job is overdue, but not before the due date is reached
- if a job is moved to Tasks Complete with open tasks, a wizard prompts to resolve
Plus with a very small setup, CLI syncs your repo’s notes (in uclusion.txt files) and code TODOs to Uclusion jobs and bugs. So if you want to jot things down inside your repo and only come to Uclusion later for planning, you can.
Team
Just as Git is useful for a solo developer but has many more features for collaboration, so with Uclusion. With a second person need basic answers:
- Should I do this work?
- There are some options - which should I take?
- What do you think of this idea?
- Can you review, at a level higher than code, what I’ve done?
The least intrusive way to get those answers is asynchronous, structured, in the same tool as your tasks.
A Uclusion inbox is backed by wizard step by step collaboration walk throughs. Alternatively, the job status, backlog, and bugs tabs also show you which jobs and bugs have notifications.
Even though the system is asynchronous, the Slack integration means you can also have a synchronous alert that assistance is requested in Uclusion.
Other ways Uclusion helps collaboration out of the box:
- Backlog jobs and bug notifications by level, approvals, reviews, estimation, and assistance.
- Move a reply to a task
- Diffs show exactly what changed
- Sanity logic - only an assignee moves a job to approved, approvals expire, question asker decides on options that can be voted, approvals require recording a certainty, you can’t move a job to assistance without saying why, top level comments strongly typed, a new review resolves old ones, a reply can be moved to a task, mentions affect who is notified and how, critical notifications cannot be dismissed without a resolution, and much more
- Placeholder users and catchup notifications for newly joined
- Outbox - track what the team owes you and poke if required
Signing up for free puts you directly into the sandbox demo of your choice.
