Today we’re releasing an upgrade to story sub-items. For many of our users, sub-items are a killer feature. It allows them to break a bigger feature into many tasks and assign those tasks to various individuals on a team.

Today’s upgrades include the following goodies:

• The sub-items status is surfaced as the sub-item’s icon. Folder means backlog, clock means in-progress, checkmark means it’s been marked as complete, and a thumbs up means it’s been accepted.
• We now show the avatar of the user the sub-item is assigned to.
• You can reorder sub-items. On hover, you’ll notice an icon to your left that will let you prioritize items within the list.
• Accepted items are now hidden. You can click the item at the bottom to expose those if you wish.
• We’ve changed the Edit and Delete links to be icons. Additionally, depending on status, you can now start, finish, accept, and reject sub-items from the sub-item list.

Additionally we’ve added a meta data line that now shows how many items have been completed or accepted along with a percentage of completion for the entire list of sub-items.

We think this is a great update to an often-used feature.

Please let us know what you think!

We’d like to introduce a nice little feature that we’re calling daily digests. These are daily emails that are pushed every 24 hours by our server to your entire team. Many teams we know send out daily, or even weekly, status reports of what they’ve been doing. This seems tedious; why can’t our tools do this stuff for us? Well, with Sprint.ly, now they can.

Daily digests are not sent for archived products nor are they sent if no activity happened in the last 24 hours for a given product. They will include the following information:

• A list of all items, including sub-items, created in the last 24 hours.
• A list of all items that were marked as complete in the last 24 hours.
• A list of all items there were accepted in the last 24 hours.
• A list of any new blockers that were created in the last 24 hours.
• A list of any code commits made in the last 24 hours.

Daily digests are also a great way to keep managers, business owners, and your clients up-to-date with movement in your products.

Let us know what you think!

Overwhelmingly so, our most popular feature since our beta launch has been the GitHub integration. Developers love the ability to not have to come back to Sprint.ly to mark an item as complete. Our continued mantra is that Sprint.ly must fit into your workflow, rather than interrupt it.

In our continued quest to keep workflows uninterrupted for our coding customers, we’re excited to announce that our popular SCM/VCS integration now works with both Beanstalk and bitbucket. If you do not use GitHub, Beanstalk, or bitbucket, don’t fret, you can make our SCM/VCS integration work with other SCM/VCS systems with a little work.

See our documentation for setting up Sprint.ly to work with Beanstalk, bitbucket, or GitHub. You might also want to check out what you can do with Sprint.ly via this awesome integration.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. – Reid Hoffman

At Sprint.ly, we’re all about shipping code. Our entire goal with Sprint.ly is to help companies ship more code and to include more people in the product creation process. While we’re proud to have launched we are also extremely excited to push out all of the features we have in the pipeline.

We wanted to talk about a few things we learned from launching Sprint.ly in the hopes that it’ll help others out there who are anxiously awaiting their own embarrassing 1.0. Overall, things went really smoothly, we think. The following are some thoughts on what we did wrong and a thing or two that turned out great.

• We intentionally launched at 7pm on a Saturday to keep things quiet and easy going (after all, we are a team of just two). This meant that we didn’t have to worry about a surge in traffic to our servers or our support queues. Additionally, we decided to start off with Sprint.ly being invitation only and to require payment information up-front as a way to lower our support costs and help us focus on improving the product.  

• We spent very little time on the copywriting. Our thought was that we should do a quick video instead as we could say and show a lot more. Our lack of proper copywriting, however, led to some initial confusion about what our product was, how payment worked, what the free trial included, etc.

• Speaking of the video, we wrongly assumed that most people, like ourselves, would rather see the product in action. While this largely turned out to be true, there was a significant amount of people out there that wanted a static, screenshot-based product tour.

Overall, we’re happy with how things shook out. I mentioned Reid’s quote to a customer I was demoing Sprint.ly to and he said, “It’s a lot more done than you think.” It’s hard, as the person launching a product, to believe that, because your vision is always going to be so much bigger than your 1.0.