Documentation of riter.co — project management tool

Getting started

This guide will be useful for both company owners and project managers. You are responsible for planning and organizing work on projects, leading teams and tracking current progress. You also need to interact with employees to provide them access to the necessary project data. Our software allows you to do all of the above with minimal effort. To manage projects with Riter, you need to be registered with manager rights or be a company owner.

The main owner's responsibility is registration a company in Riter. The rest of owners' capabilities coincide with the manager's role. To get started with Riter as a manager, you need to follow the steps:

• register developers in Riter unless you are the only user going to work on projects on your own;
• create projects, project groups and start work on them.

Note, that each project can have any number of developers. You can add, edit and view all these data on the corresponding pages in the admin panel. General statistics page allows you to track working hours on all projects and users. You can navigate through the pages using the main menu items.

Switching roles

A project manager in Riter is a developer with additional rights. You can easily switch between development and management modes (admin panel). The first one allows you to work on tasks, track and estimate time spent on them, set up sprints, topics, distribute tasks among developers, etc. To know more about development tools in Riter, look through the development guide.

To get to the company management section (admin panel) from the development mode, click on your nickname in the upper right corner and select an item "Manage company" from the drop-down menu. You can return to the development process by clicking on a particular project name from the drop-down list "Select project" in the main menu. If you have the only project, you will see its name instead of the list. Just click on it, to leave the admin panel and start working on the project.

Team management

As a manager, you need to organize a team of developers, manage their access to projects, track working process and be aware of each user's contribution. Riter makes it easier to navigate and control all the users data. On the users page you will find a list of all developers with short information about each of them: a full name and a nickname, projects which the user is involved in, a special role if it's assigned to the user. To get on a particular project's or user's page just click on the corresponding name. Icons in the upper right corner of some user's cards tell you about his or her role of a manager or/and an owner. Hover the icon to know its meaning. If a user has no such an icon, this is a usual developer without additional rights.

Adding Riter users

To sign up a new developer in Riter, click on 'New user' and fill in the registration form. You need to specify the user's first and last name, nickname and email. Nickname is a short alias used in the system for convenience. You can find out a developer's full name in any moment by hovering a mouse over his icon or nickname. The email will be used to complete the registration process. To do this, the user should go to the email, click on the received confirmation link and specify the account password on the opened page. All the user's data can be modified later by a manager.

A user page

On a particular user page you can find the profile information (full name, email, etc.) and detailed statistics on worked hours for each project. Here you are also able to revoke the user's access to projects. New users need to be assigned to work on project pages. Also, you can revoke user access to a particular project on its page.

Project management

On the main company management page you will find a list of available projects and short information about them. The submenu allows you to switch between active, disabled (already finished) projects, and project groups. Here you can also find a link to create a new one. You will need to specify its parameters, a developers, give them access to the project before they are able to start work on it.

New project

Creating a new project, you set the following characteristics:

• Its name and shortname (for simultaneous working with a group of projects).
• Assign developers from a list to the project.

To edit an existing project or get detailed information about any find it in the list and click on the title to go to the project page.

New project group

In the submenu on the main page, go to the "Groups" section to create a new group or edit an existing one. There you'll find a list of all available projects and project groups. To create a new one, just choose a new name and specify a set of projects to include. Then everybody who has access to all these projects will be able to work with this group as with a separate project. At the moment, only managers are able to create project groups, so we expect you to create such groups for your team members by request. In future, all developers will be able to do this on their own.

Project groups may be useful if you have several related projects and need to track all their data simultaneously. At the same time, each of them is an independent application with an own team of developers and you don't want to mix them into one big project. In addition, project groups can be used to combine several projects of a particular user so that he doesn't need to switch between them all the time.

A project page

All project management activities can be performed on this page. Here you will find all information about the chosen project:

• a project name, a shortname;
• worked hours, activity on the project;
• assigned users;
• project settings.

Click on the settings icon on the right of the project name to modify the project data. You can edit its name, shortname. To mark the project as disabled go to the setting tab below. On this page you will see tabs with information about project story states, users and their statistics. Choose a necessary one to get additional data on them.

The project "States" tab includes stories statistics grouped by their states: number of stories, general spent (dirty) and estimated (clean) time for each state.

Project users

The "Users" tab contains a list of all users (managers and developers) of your company to assign them to the project or revoke access. Icons of assigned users' are highlighted. Just click an icon to give or revoke access. Hover a user's icon to see his or her full name and nickname.

Project settings

In this tab you can find several useful sections:

• “General information” section with some basic data about the project. In this section, you can update its name, shortname of the project. Also, here you’ll find a slug of the project — this value can be used to access the project via API.

• “Display overdue” section. It allows you to set up the behavior of unapproved stories when a sprint which they belong to is archived. If you leave the checkbox “Display overdue stories” ticked, it will work as follows. When a particular sprint is archived, all approved stories included will get into “Archived stories”. The rest of the tasks which are scheduled on this sprint but are not approved yet will get into the “Overdue” section. They will be archived only after somebody completes and approves them. If you clear the checkbox, stories won’t get into the “Overdue” section even when you archive a sprint with unfinished tasks. All stories will fall into “Archived stories” at once. You will be able to find all the stories there and continue working on them when necessary.

• "Lock working hours" By default, users can record working hours — time intervals spent on projects — for any date in the past. With this option, users with the access to the “Admin panel” (both a company administrator and project managers) can limit adding and updating working intervals which were created before a certain date. You can update this value regularly to be sure that nothing is corrected or tampered in the working hours after your final review and approval. Just let your team know that they should record working intervals on time, whenever possible — as soon as the corresponding interval has ended.

• "Disable project". Use this button to stop all activity in this project. You can always activate the project again from the 'Disabled' projects tab. Keep noted that users won't be able even to open it while the project is disabled.

Working hours

"Working hours" page includes all the company's projects statistics grouped by users, weeks and weekdays. It allows you to find out the amount of time spent by each developer on work for a certain day and the whole week at once. You can exclude particular users and projects from statistics by using the appropriate filters on the right. Note that statistics take into account dirty hours which may differ from clean ones.

Company settings

The company “Settings” page has the only ability for now: you can send us a request to delete your company and any information which we could collect and store about it according to our Privacy and Cookie Policies. As required by the GDPR regulation you have the right “to be forgotten”. If you send us such a request, we’ll contact you just to make sure you’re confident in your actions and understand that the data can not be restored after complete removal. After that, your company will be removed.