Everybody knows that people are naturally lazy, and programmers are doubly lazy. Taking into account the continuous development of technologies and improving the living standards, the situation is unlikely to change in the nearest future. And this's for the best. Lazy people are always looking for the easiest way to solve a problem, and no project manager or methodology will change their way of thinking.

Market Overview

That's why all the existing project management tools are fundamentally wrong. At the moment, none of them can completely replace personal conversation, instant chat and paper notes when it comes to planning and discussing a task. Instead of saving users from unnecessary work, they add even more responsibilities, forcing the team to adjust to their workspace. The situation is aggravated by the fact that the IT industry is expanding rapidly, and representatives of an increasing number of professions are becoming involved in the software development process. In these conditions, the lack of convenient means of communication is particularly noticeable.

Today the market of project management software is represented by several large companies and a lot of small ones. The most significant of them are Jira, Trello, Basecamp, Wrike, Asana and some others. Each of them is undoubtedly a good choice for certain workflow. For example, Jira is focused on Agile development, regardless of methodologies. It includes a large store of add-ons and plugins, which add extra functionality to the product. In our development process, we primarily look up to Jira, trying to provide the same flexibility for the own app. However, for some teams Jira may seem a bit too complicated solution. Basecamp, on the contrary, is easy to use but it is considered insufficiently adapted to handle complex and long-term projects, as well as for use in large companies. Trello is a free project management tool based on Kanban methodology. Besides web and mobile versions, it provides a convenient desktop application. This app is also more suitable for small teams and projects.

The market is full of similar software products, but requirements of the modern world and achievements in technologies make us look for something more effective. In the next 5 years the software market will change a lot, as well as process management in companies. According to the last researches, the main trends in project management will be the increased use of analytics and Agile methodologies, more remote teams, a great impact of artificial intelligence with maximum automation of the workplace and large-scale integration of various fields of activity. The role of chat rooms in the workflow will continue to increase, while the need for a structured way of task planning will remain in force.

Our Vision

Our mission is to create a solution that can compete with live communication, paper notes and any other way of teamwork and task planning. Such a tool should be always at hand, anticipate your intentions and eliminate most of the routine duties. We are convinced that all work that can be automated must be such. To this end, we create Riter – a smart project management and team collaboration tool powered by artificial intelligence.

Agile-oriented Riter app will fully meet the requirements of industry. A store of bots and a powerful GraphQl API will make it possible to integrate Riter with any existing software. Chatbots will allow users to plan and make changes to tasks just during their conversation with colleagues without having to open the application. Based on the successful experience of Jira's add-on market, we can say that bots are the future of project management.

Thanks to convenient and fast desktop and mobile applications, developers will be able to always stay in touch and be aware of last changes in the project. In addition, Riter software will include a powerful artificial intelligence responsible for organizing the workflow with minimal efforts and mistakes on the part of developers. It will learn to deal with the most of project management duties so that users could be freed from routine work, complex calculations and long disputes about development process. Riter AI will be able to:

• Reduce tasks estimation errors taking into account the individual characteristics of developers, such as productivity and accuracy coefficients, average number of worked hours per sprints, current load level, previous experience and gathered statistics.

• Automate sprints planning, calculating the exact timing of tasks and distributing them in an optimal way among developers, predict sprint success or failure and define real deadlines which can be met.

• Automate time tracking process by monitoring user's activity during the workflow and recognizing screen content.

Thus, Riter will be able to say not only the accurate time when a particular user was working, but also exactly what he was doing, tracking his actions in real time and committing them in the system instead of him. Managers will no longer have to watch for the team to follow all bureaucratic subtleties – the program will do everything for them, while the developers will be able to devote extra time to really useful tasks. Moreover, Riter AI effectivity will be increasing in the process of use as it will adapt to peculiarities of the team and projects.

The Road Behind

Riter is a workable product, ready to be introduced to the market. It already includes the following functionality:

• Management of the whole company, not just individual projects. Among all existing products, this is provided only by Jira. This opens additional opportunities for allocating company's resources among projects, gathering general statistics, unified management of customers and teams and parallel work with groups of projects.

  

• Team management and control, available to managers and company owners. This includes detailed statistics by different criteria (worked hours, activity, performance and so on) and at different levels of management (project and general company statistics), access control and distribution of roles within projects.

• Full-featured task management and sprint planning in the project at Trello level. Users are able to manage their projects by Agile principles, distinguish tasks with topics and states, divide them into subtasks, take a part in task discussions and share files. Riter provides simple navigation and smart search and filtering options, as well as topics aliases for convenience.

  

• System of task estimation and time tracking. Riter uses its own task estimation approach based on clean and dirty hours concepts. This allows users to more objectively evaluate time spent on tasks.

• GraphQL API as an alternative to the obsolete REST API.

• Demo-company which is designed to demonstrate all Riter functionality on ready-made data sets.

• Use of the latest technologies to automatically update and synchronize application data without reloading pages.

• Full and up-to-date documentation, constant product support and improvement.

Coming Soon

Riter development is carried out according to a clear and consistent strategy.

In July 2018, we proceed to create a platform for writing bots which will allow to expand Riter capabilities as needed, without overburdening all users with extra features. At the first stages we will be their only developers. Riter bot system can provide not less opportunities than Jira plugins do, furthermore, our bots may be written in any language and placed on either our servers or on the client side.

In August 2018, we are going to create the first set of bots for integration with the most popular third-party resources, first of all, with Slack. The presence of simple methods of integration with existing services will ensure a quick and smooth users transition to our product. By focusing on bots, we provide an alternative payment tariff where teams can only pay for used bots, without taking into account the size of the company and the number of projects.

In September 2018, we will be working on predicting story estimates based on the initial Riter AI. To this end, Riter will be learning to construct a function that approximates the number of hours worked by developers, and then performs extrapolation of the accumulated data to predict exact timing of the current sprint completion.

By October 2018, the existing functionality of task planning will be expanded by such opportunities as a dashboard with all the latest project changes, notification system and more settings options.

In November 2018, we plan to open a store of bots, where everyone will be able to add their own bots and get interest from their work. In addition, Riter users will get an ability to create private bots for their personal usage.

In December 2018, we are launching the desktop application. The practice of other project management tools, in particular, Trello, shows that users tend to use desktop applications when they are convenient enough. In our application, we will target developers of such a fast and native application as Telegram. In the winter of the same year, we will also release mobile versions of Riter for major platforms. Due to existing API, their implementation will be rather simple and quick.

By March 2019, we will complete the main functionality of Riter AI for automated time tracking. An application running in the background will monitor and analyze user's actions to determine what exactly he is working on. Having access to his tasks in Riter, the service will be able to independently generate time intervals, add comments, change story states and much more. Together with chatbots, AI will become a powerful tool for maximum automation of the workflow.

We believe that our project management tool will be a good choice for many teams regardless of their size, methodology and work conditions. In our development strategy we try to take the best from existing approaches and tools, but not to be limited to them. The industry is changing and our workspace must keep in trace with it. Every day new technologies give us something new, and it would be a significant mistake to ignore this.

Riter development team