Documentation of riter.co — project management tool

Glossary

User roles

To use Riter, you need to go through some simple steps. This software is designed for different categories of users. Your opportunities and ways of Riter usage depend on what role you take in the team. It can be useful for company owners, project managers, developers and all kinds of stakeholders.

Administrator

a head of the company responsible for its registration in the system. You need to sign up to use Riter. Come up with a subdomain name, specify your email and nickname to create a new account. Then you’ll get a message with a confirmation link to your email address. When you activate the account, you can start using Riter as a manager.

Manager

a project manager who finds developers and gives them access to their Riter accounts. A manager is responsible for planning and controlling the work on the company projects. This role allows tracking statistics on users, stories, and projects. He or she can be a developer at the same time and go to the project manager page from the account menu to get access to additional capabilities. To find out how to lead teams and projects with Riter, go through this admin guide

Developer

a Riter user who is going to work on projects with other team members under the guidance of a manager. A developer is able to operate project stories, fix and track worked hours, tasks states, be aware of all aspects of the development process. If you are a developer and want to learn more about your workspace and tool options, go through users guide before beginning your work on tasks.

Guest

a kind of a Riter user which can look through a current project state, statistics on developers and other information that may be useful for interested parties, for example, for employees who are not involved in the development process directly. The guest is not perceived by Riter as part of any development teams, but this user is able to gather necessary data about them without affecting or distracting them from work.

Task planning

Riter provides you with a wide range of tools for planning tasks and organizing the workflow in accordance with the standard practice of your company. You can schedule tasks for any sprint and easily redistribute them if necessary. A comprehensive task description allows your team members to distinguish different types of work and quickly navigate among them.

Sprint

This is a way to group and plan your tasks according to a specific criterion. For example, separate sprints can be created for different versions of your product, for different time intervals, for a specific type of tasks. Bu default, you have the only sprint for all current tasks. If you add at least one new sprint, an “Unscheduled” sprint section also appears for all unscheduled tasks. If you archive a sprint with unapproved stories, you get an additional “Overdue” section with these tasks.

Story

a separate task within a project, describing some independent part of the job. Project division into small tasks simplifies its management and allows to distribute workload between developers equally. Project representation as a group of stories makes each team member more aware of its current progress. For each story, you can set a detailed description, involved developers, related topics, add comments, estimate required for implementation time and track spent hours. “Archive” stories include ones which were scheduled for sprints that are already archived. The rest of them are displayed as “Current” stories.

Story state

a story characteristic which determines the level of its completeness. This basic set of states includes five default values: “Draft” (for just created and not estimated stories), “Estimated” (expected time for the story implementation was specified), “In progress” (the story is now being realized), “Completed” (the story was marked as done but was not approved yet) and “Approved” (the story was checked by a team lead and accepted). The basic set of states can be supplemented by other values for particular projects. All the states can be distinguished by color.

Topic

a word or a word combination which describes a story purpose and essence to simplify its identification and filtering among other tasks for developers. Creating a new story, they can select related topics from already existing project set or add new values that describe the task in the best way. All topics can be active (currently used in a project) or archived (are out-of-use at the moment and are not shown on story pages). Each topic can have several aliases to avoid duplicating similar names.

Assignee

a user assigned to a story and shown on its page as checked along with all other developers, who have access to the current project. It is assumed that this user is involved in the task implementation while unassigned developers aren’t. Each story can be realized by several performers. All users added to a particular project can be assigned/unassigned to its tasks. However, they can discuss a story on its page and create time intervals regardless of their assignment.

Time tracking

Riter allows to estimate tasks and track time spent on them. Many factors need to be taken into account during time estimation and tracking. Riter is aimed to make estimates more accurate, using calculated coefficients of users’ effectiveness and precision, collective assessment of tasks and automatic tracking of working hours.

Clean hours

time that a developer would spend directly on the task if everything was clear, ready for work and nothing interrupted the workflow. This is the ideal time, which assumes that a developer is well versed in his field and does not make mistakes. This estimate does not take into account risks and various difficulties. Users specify expected clean hours while estimating a task and real spent values in time intervals during work on it.

Dirty hours

time that a user spends on the task as a whole. This evaluation includes interruptions, solving technical problems, discussion common questions with the team. This time is set during work process in time interval section. Dirty hours are used while generating and displaying user’s statistics. This time estimate can coincide or be greater than clean hours.

Timeinterval

a description of a separate time period spent on a particular task. For each interval you can set the date, involved users, and clean hours spent on the task. Time intervals allow to break down task implementation into some periods of continuous work so that other developers could know at what stage your current progress is and what exactly you are working on.

Statistics

Project statistics includes information about dirty gross working hours and developers’ activity during the workflow. Global company statistics is available for project managers and owners and includes data on all projects, users. Except of estimated and spent hours, it also displays statistics on story states.

Statistics

Project statistics includes information about dirty gross working hours and developers’ activity during the workflow. Global company statistics is available for project managers and owners and includes data on all projects, users. Except of estimated and spent hours, it also displays statistics on story states.

Gross working hours

dirty hours spent on work by a particular user (users) during some period. When users are working on some tasks, they fix real time spent on them in the time intervals. These values are accumulated and displayed in each project statistics.

General statistics

reports on gross working hours grouped by weeks, weekdays and users for some project. It also includes statistics on a particular week and a weekday for a specified user as well as common team statistics for a specific day.

Activity statistics

statistics on tasks which all users were involved in during the workflow. It shows how much time they spent for each task they were assigned to. All the data are grouped by weeks, developers and stories.

Project management

Company

the main entity, the management of which is provided by Riter. All projects are created and developed within your own company, registered in the system. It includes all the data required for work not only on the current project, but on all other ones. Developers, working environment are tied to your company and can be used for each new project. Every company has its own subdomain and owner.

Project

joint team work on a product with certain goals and requirements. Each project in Riter can be created within a particular company. Although a project represents a complete and independent entity, it can be divided into tasks and subtasks for convenience. You can also manipulate with groups of projects simultaneously if necessary.

Project group

several projects combined together for simultaneous work with them. Tasks of all included projects are displayed on the same pages with a special alias of a related project. Statistics on a group of projects contain united data of their stories and users. Additional project filters become available for statistics pages.