A self-learning artificial intelligence, an extensive third party integration with a system of bots and a rest of "coming soon" features are not the only way to increase your team productivity with Riter - you can already become more efficient with existing functionality. We have prepared some application tricks which you might have missed if you are new to our project management tool. You should find out more about them to greatly simplify your daily duties regardless of whether you are a manager, a developer or another involved party.

1. Customize the system for your needs

As you know, the strongest motivation is to work well now, so that not to work afterwards. In other words, when setting up the software for a specific team and a project, it is better to put a little effort into it at once, thus saving yourself from the routine work in the future. At the moment, Riter allows you to configure the use of topics aliases by different team members. This is a great mechanism for increasing mutual understanding among colleagues who are accustomed to using various terms in their work. In big companies, the problem of ambiguities is especially spread. Aliases allow you not to bother about the vocabulary - everyone can continue using definitions he prefers without any harm to the project. At the same time, within each project a specific naming convention will be retained. Thanks to aliases, there is no generation of many similar topics, while a convenient identification of tasks and simple navigation still are kept.

2. Constantly expand your possibilities

Any restrictions in the workflow turn into shortcomings of the final product. We develop Riter as quickly as possible, but for now, if you need to expand its capabilities, use GraphQl API. We hope you will find it powerful enough for your goals and evaluate its advantages over traditional REST API. We try to keep the up-to-date documentation where you can find out everything necessary for the API usage. Remember - nothing is impossible for your team. If some part of your daily routine can be automated, you just must do it. Or you may write to us how we can make Riter even better, and maybe one day the required functionality will suddenly appear itself.

3. Search tips, filtering aliases and key words

Do you have to deal with dozens of projects and tasks every day? Even if we assume that all tasks are neatly composed, users are assigned, and topics (and aliases) are properly arranged, searching and navigating among tasks can take a considerable amount of time. In this situation some search and filtering options can turn up quite useful. The search bar allows you to find necessary tasks by their states, titles, participants and topics. You can also combine these parameters in your queries. The process is designed to simplify and predict users intentions while searching and filtering stories. Riter understands a lot of keywords and aliases for commonly used filters, such as "todo", "toestimate", "actual" and so on. Thanks to filtering aliases, you do not need to keep in mind every filter - even if you forget it, you will probably able to guess the right filter name (or one of its aliases), as they're rather obvious.

4. Spend less time planning

Often we need to create a bunch of tasks at once, just not to forget about anything after a meeting. Let's leave a detailed description of each task for the assigned users, or even for ourselves, but for the future - we can deal with them later. Do we need to go to the page of each specific task to fill up all available fields? Not really. Riter provides a way of a quick task creation from the main page. We recommend you to study its features - one day it can save you a lot of time. All information about the task can be added immediately, although there are some limitations.

5. Time management tricks

Accounting for working time is a tedious, but inevitable duty of every developer. Committing regular worked hours, you should specify a lot of time interval parameters about time spent on the story. Who was working during this period on the task? When it actually happened? At what time did you work and how much time did you spend on the task itself (clean and dirty hours)? And finally, what did you actually do at that time?

In fact, many of the fields may be missing. In this case, Riter will try to fill them for you as accurately as possible. If the performer is not specified explicitly, it probably is you. The date by default is set as current. Clean and dirty hours are equal by default if you specify only one of the values. A comment can also be empty if the task speaks for itself. Thus, instead of a full description of the interval you can specify it, for example, like this: "1h 30m Debugging and code refactoring" and save yourself some time. Of course, if you suddenly remember that last week you did not add some time interval working in a team with a couple of colleagues, you'll have to do it manually.

6. Simultaneous work with multiple projects

Be multitasking. How many projects are you involved in - one, two or, maybe, a few dozens? Riter allows you to work in parallel with some of them, for example, if they are interrelated or you just want to see all your work at once. It's possible thanks to groups of projects. With Riter, you don't need to switch between several projects you are working with all the time to look through existing tasks, create a new one or track the statistics. You can save a lot of time combining some projects into temporary groups instead. It gives you the possibility to unite data of related projects and display it on the same pages for convenience.

7. Avoid a pig in a poke

With each update, the functionality of Riter expands, and these new opportunities need to be explored in order to take full advantages of the program. Poorly learnt tools are fraught with errors in the workflow, the price of which can range from minimal annoyance to serious threats to the project. Encourage your team to follow and experiment with new features, but do it at a safe distance from your own workspace. Namely, test new Riter capabilities via the demo company - don't be afraid to break something important there. All data of this company is regularly reset to its original state, so feel free to get acquainted with the software as far as you need.

Do not limit yourself to some listed functions - look for your own ways to increase productivity of the work process. Learn to set goals and communicate within your team. Do not make others puzzle over what you are doing right now, and especially lose time, figuring it out from you directly. Break big task into subtasks, use markdown to make your story description or comments more informative to the rest of team members. Attach images or other files if necessary. Use a question mark to attract attention to unclear issues. Use appropriate topics, timely change task states to actual ones and commit work performed, so that the whole team would always stay up-to-date with the current project progress.

Riter development team