Unfuddle: We bring your projects to life.

UI Updates and The New Board in Unfuddle STACK

Mon, 07 Sep 2020 12:00:01 +0000

You may recall that, in response to our survey earlier this year, we committed to some pretty significant updates to Unfuddle STACK. We started by implementing sweeping performance improvements. And now we are doubling down on our commitments by releasing a very exciting, and very visible update to the user interface.

Revamping the entire interface of STACK was no easy task. We knew that we needed to respect the workflows that many of you have used for years. But we also needed to modernize the interface and bring uniformity across the various pillars of the application.

Please allow us to share with you some of the significant usability improvements we have been working on.

Board View

We will start with the update that most of you will likely appreciate the most. Unfuddle STACK now has a full-featured, flexible board integrated directly in ticket reports. While a board is not technically a new concept in STACK, this update brings significant changes and improvements:

Instead of being a view on milestones, which was rather clumsy, the board now comes as a view on ticket reports. Why is this a huge change? Well, now you can use the existing super flexible ticket report filtering and grouping to create the board that you need. Group by assignees to quickly overview and assign work. Group by status to create a Kanban or Scrum board, or just simply handle the workflows dictated by your own methodology. The possibilities and flexibility are endless.
The board engine is completely rewritten to handle as many tasks as you have. You can literally have boards with thousands of tickets and the interaction should remain smooth and clean.
Whenever possible, sorting columns and adding new ones can be done directly from the board interface. There is no longer a need to jump to the Project Settings page just to add new statuses!
All accounts, no matter the subscription level, will now have access to Boards. It's so incredibly useful that we felt everyone should just have it.

Notebooks

Notebooks are STACK’s take on a wiki for your projects. However, they have always seemed to lag behind the rest of the application with regard to usability. While the data itself was well structured, the interface was not very helpful with browsing through the pages of a notebook or editing.

Essentially, a notebook is just a collection of pages. And this is exactly how we are presenting them through this update. Browsing through the pages of a notebook is now easy, with filtering for quick find and without losing context.

Also, reading a page is now made much easier with standardized page width limits, spacing, and the new styling. We’ve also moved all nonessential interface elements out of the way. It’s like a breath of fresh air.

People and Settings Pages

The People tab has been completely refactored to something more of a list view. Details about individuals can be seen at a glance. Overall, it is SO much easier to use, especially if you have a lot of people in your account.

We have reorganized the Personal and Account Settings pages so everything is now more intuitive and easier to find. If you are an account admin, the Account Settings page can be accessed in the dropdown under you name, or at the right of the navigation bar when browsing the Account Dashboard - All Projects section.

General Look and Feel

In addition to the above mentioned feature updates, we are sure that you will notice that we have completely polished and modernized our interface, aiming for consistency, usability and beauty. While we understand an interface can never be perfect, we think we have found a good direction for improvement. Everything is now easier to read and more consistent across different areas of the interface. You will find many small surprises that make everyday use just better.

Thank You

From all of us here at Unfuddle, we want to thank you for your continued loyalty. We love building tools that make your projects come to life. And we are working hard to continue to bring even more great improvements to Unfuddle later this year.

Stay safe and healthy,

The Unfuddle Team

Two-Factor Authentication Updates for Unfuddle STACK

Tue, 05 May 2020 12:00:01 +0000

Many of you have asked for a more versatile Two-Factor authentication system that you can use with different Authenticator apps, even from the first time we introduced the Two-Factor Authentication in Unfuddle.

We have recently deployed an update that will allow you to use your favourite Authenticator to sign in into your Unfuddle STACK account!

Here are some of the many Authenticators that are now compatible with our 2FA system:

Google Authenticator (iPhone/Android)
LastPass Authenticator (iPhone/Android/Windows)
Microsoft Authenticator (iPhone/Android)
Authy (iPhone/Android/More…)

If you already have 2FA enabled, just go to your Personal Settings page and click “Reset and Reconfigure” under the “Two-Factor Authentication” section.

If you haven’t done so, we strongly recommend enabling two-factor authentication to increase the security of your account.

Find more details on how to enable 2FA authentication in STACK and much more in our support section.

As always, if you have any feedback or suggestions we are happy to hear you! Don’t hesitate to contact us, or leave a comment below.

Roadmap for Unfuddle STACK

Thu, 26 Mar 2020 00:00:01 +0000

You may recall that we recently sent a survey to our customers to find out what we could be doing better to serve you.

We want to thank you for the overwhelming response to this survey.

You shared your thoughts, your joys and your pains. And this feedback has been incredibly helpful. It has already begun to affect our development efforts! After a deep analysis of your responses, our team decided that we will be working on the following areas that will directly improve your daily experience with Unfuddle STACK:

UI/UX Modernization

It’s clear from your responses that many of you feel that our interface is deprecating a bit and some workflows could really be streamlined.

So we are taking steps to improve and polish it.

That being said, we are very sensitive to the fact that many of you have grown accustomed to the current flows. Rest assured that we will do our best to move deliberately and carefully with these changes so as not to change things too quickly. We know that people need time to adapt.

Integrations

Many of you shared with us the importance of integrating with your favorite tools and services.

To that end, we are committing to improve on the existing integrations as well as connect with other external services to make your lives easier. This includes services like Slack, interactions with email notifications (eg: reply to comments on tickets) and others.

Did you know that there are already several apps and services that interact with our extensive API? We also plan on improving existing Repository Callbacks so that setting them up for interaction with your favorite CI system would be made easier.

Also, one other thing that many of you have asked for is a 2FA solution compatible with other systems such as Google Authenticator not just Authy. We have already begun work on this and are hoping to get a new solution out to all of you soon!

Performance Improvements

Performance is another theme that showed up in many of your responses.

We understand that some of you, especially with larger repositories have been experiencing degraded performance. This is especially true when introspecting the repository through the web interface.

In response, we have already begun work on improving performance.

Our internal tests already reveal significant improvement. We are just now preparing to release these updates to production and are excited that they will have immediate impact for many of you, both with the web interface and repository interactions.

Thank you so much again for helping us make Unfuddle even better!

Photo by Hello I’m Nik 🎞 on Unsplash

Introducing Flexible Permissions in Unfuddle TEN

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 00:00:01 +0000

When we first launched Unfuddle TEN, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for small, trusted teams to get working together. To do this, we implemented a very minimal permissions system. For the most part, if you were invited into an Unfuddle TEN project, you were IN — you could do most things.

But we understand that many teams need a bit more control. Today, we are launching a flexible permission system that will allow more fine-grained control over your projects.

Project permissions are managed through the use of aliases. For each permission type (i.e. Can View Tasks, Can Commit to Repositories, etc.), you can specify a list of user and group aliases that have such access.

By default, permissions in new projects are granted using two special aliases: @all and @admin. @all always represents everyone invited into your project. @admin represents your project administrators. In Organizations, @admin is implicitly granted to all Organization Administrators. However, the @admin alias can also be added to any person you would like to have full control over your project.

Please note, it may be necessary to assign additional aliases to your users, adding them to groups like @admin (or @dev, or @marketing, or @whatever). You can do this from the “People” tab.

To prevent interruption to your workflow, your existing projects are configured with liberal permissions that match the original openness of Unfuddle TEN. However, all new projects will have slightly more constrained permissions that you can configure after project creation. You can configure your project permissions from the “Settings” tab.

This is our first permissions-related release. We have plans to extend permissions further down the document hierarchy. For example, eventually you will be able to create tasks and comments that are visible to only a subset of your team. Or you will be able to create branches in a repository that are only writeable by a certain subset of people.

Please try these new permissions out and let us know what you think!

Unfuddle: Notice of Data Breach

Tue, 02 May 2017 00:00:01 +0000

What Happened

We’ve identified and addressed security incidents which occurred on or about March 27 and April 13, where an unauthorized third party was able to initiate access to Unfuddle’s servers and its server information, potentially affecting Unfuddle products such as Unfuddle STACK, Unfuddle TEN or AgilePad projects (collectively, “Unfuddle”). We wanted to inform you about everything we know, as soon as we assessed the incident. We believe that this incident was not widespread, and that the vast majority of Unfuddle accounts were not affected. We have also found no other evidence of other Unfuddle systems or products being affected by this incident.

What Information Was Involved

Upon further analysis of the incident, some evidence showed signs of compromise to Unfuddle products. This means any sensitive data used during business, such as account details and source code data could have been affected or compromised by this incident. Personal customer information, financial and credit card data were not identified as being affected by this incident; unless, customers separately stored key personal or financial information on their accounts, which Unfuddle would not be aware of.

What We Are Doing

In addition to internal monitoring, we have engaged our security team to assess the incident, build and improve Unfuddle’s current processes, architecture, and controls. The following is being conducted in response and resolution to the incident:

We have completely replaced and updated all Unfuddle credentials related to Unfuddle infrastructure.
We have audited and strengthened access controls to keep potential unauthorized users off the system.
We have replaced Unfuddle’s SSL certificates to ensure communications continue to be encrypted and maintain the integrity of SSL.
We have enhanced monitoring and alerting to identify unauthorized access to our systems and machines.
We are designing and implementing a new network model with enhanced security zones and network segmentation.
We are improving our host-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) software on all systems.

What You Can Do

As a precaution, Unfuddle STACK users should login to the platform and change their passwords immediately. You will be prompted to do so automatically the next time you log in. This step is not necessary for Unfuddle TEN or AgilePad customers.
Never store or share personal data on your Unfuddle accounts.
Make sure you are not storing third party credentials in your source code or attachments. While we generally believe customer repository data to be untouched, customers should change any credentials they may have stored in those repositories.
Any sensitive data or credentials stored in tickets or attachments should be changed.

Other Important Information

This is an ongoing investigation and Unfuddle will actively be working with law enforcement authorities on the investigation of this matter. Unfuddle’s Security Team will be increasing security monitoring, alerting, audit trails, and incident responses. We are also actively monitoring customer accounts to ensure that no further information was affected. We have already isolated the affected systems and confirmed that any further unauthorized access is not possible. To reiterate, we have found no evidence of other Unfuddle systems or products being affected beyond those mentioned in this notice.

For More Information

For more information, please go to https://unfuddle.com/blog/2017/05/important-notice/, contact us at support@unfuddle.com, or call us at +1-877-863-8335.

A Simple Code Review Workflow in Unfuddle TEN

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

You should include code review in your development workflow

It can be intimidating to get started with git merge requests and code review and integrating them into your existing workflows. But as your projects and your team grow, having these built into your processes can significantly aid your development. Here are a few benefits you will see:

Code review facilitates knowledge sharing across your team.
Code review helps you maintain a more unified and consistent code base.
Code review helps you make better estimates.
Code review prevents technical debt from creeping into your projects.
Code review allows you to take more vacations.
Code review will save your team a lot of time in the long-run.

While it may sound complicated, Unfuddle TEN makes it very easy to get started with code review in your team. Here's how it works.

Using Branches in Git

You probably track bugs, issues, and upcoming features for your products in your tasks. That's great! But are you using branches in your git repository to maintain a healthy workflow? Many teams make code changes right in the master branch of their repositories. They then close the task and move on. This can cause many problems and make it more difficult to undo changes to the code.

Rather than working only in master, code review depends on branching. Before working on any new task, a developer should first create a branch and make all relevant modifications in that branch. When the work is complete, then the developer should create a merge request on the task in Unfuddle TEN.

Merge Requests

Merge requests give your team the opportunity to review and comment on the work BEFORE it gets merged into the master branch.

For example, if we are working to resolve a bug in our product, such as the one below:

We would first create a branch called "12-bat-gloves-bug" and make the necessary changes in that branch. When finished, we push our branch up to the repository in Unfuddle TEN. Then we create a merge request from the task in Unfuddle TEN, specifying the branch where we did our work.

Now the task has some new tabs that show the files and changes included in the merge request. Our team members can now easily see that this task has an open merge request waiting for review.

Now, it's time for the team to help out. Team members have the opportunity review each change and make comments right inline in the code. These are some of the types of issues a code reviewer might look for:

Does the code look correct?
Does the code conform to the project's style guidelines?
Are there any obvious logical errors?
Does the code meet the requirements of the original specification?
Were any necessary tests written and were they sufficient?
Do we need to update any other areas of the code to conform to these changes?

The team can comment on any of the lines in the changed files. These comments will appear inline with the code, but they will also appear on the task activity tab.

Making Modifications

Code review discussions will often lead to modifications to the code. Any necessary updates should be made in the same branch in which the original work was done. Once the new changes are pushed up to the Unfuddle TEN repository, they will automatically be included in the merge request. Conversation can continue until the team reaches consensus on the code and it is ready to merge.

Merging

So we've finished our code review and have decided that the code is good! Alright! Now, we need to merge the code into master. We can do this using our git client, as normal. Or we can perform the merge right within the Unfuddle TEN task:

Finally, once the merge is complete, we can delete the branch where we did our work.

And that's it. You just rocked code review!

Unfuddle: Task Todos and Activity

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 00:00:01 +0000

This week, we launched a helpful new feature on tasks. You can now add a list of todos. This is great for remembering how much of a task you have completed. It’s also great for bigger tasks that you don’t want to break into into multiple separate tasks.

Click the add todo button on the upper-right hand corner of the task to get started. And don’t forget that you can reorder todos by just dragging and dropping them in the list.

We have also integrated task activity, such as tag and milestone changes, directly inline with the comments on a task. This gives you a great way to view how a task has evolved over time.

Of course, we’ve also shipped a number of performance improvements and bug fixes. You might especially note that the Activity page is now significantly faster than before.

Keep those comments and requests coming!

Unfuddle TEN: Multiple Repositories

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 00:00:01 +0000

Many software projects often rely on multiple repositories. Sometimes a project simply has multiple, significant components which make sense to keep separate. Sometimes it is just useful to fork the codebase to support significant variations of a product. No matter the reason, this is now possible in Unfuddle. All projects in Organizations can contain an number of Git repositories.

Each repository has a name and optional description to help you keep track of your code. You can drill down into each repo in the interface just as you would expect. The same commit history, merge requests, and code review abilities are all there.

We’ve got some more updates coming later this week, and plenty more in the pipeline. What’s the one thing you would want to see in Unfuddle TEN that’s not there yet? Let us know!

Unfuddle TEN: Taskboard Update

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 00:00:01 +0000

You can now add tasks directly to any taskboard column. Regardless of the way your taskboard might be arranged, adding a task to a column will automatically give the task the appropriate tags or associate it with the column’s milestone.

Check it out:

It doesn’t get much easier that that – if your taskboard is arranged by @alias, adding a task to a column will automatically add that alias to the task. If your tasks are arranged by milestone then a new task added to the column will be associated with the milestone.

Please continue to give us your feedback. We love hearing from you and enabling you to be more productive in your projects!

Unfuddle TEN New Features: Improved Task Card Features

Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:14:00 +0000

Continuing with our recent usability updates, we’ve just rolled out a significant overhaul to how our task cards look and function. Say hello to the new look:

We’ve reduced the number of clicks necessary to find what you are looking for. There is more information on each task card, and they’re easier to read.

Specific types of info now appear in predictable places making a board full of tasks so much easier to parse. Status always appears in the top right and Milestone in the bottom left. Avatars for all people on the task now appear in the bottom right and replace the “@person” tags that would appear all over the place before. Finally, task cards now show information for comments, attachments, merge requests, and dates all in a consistent space.

Include Images On Task Cards

You can assign an images to cards now! Want to get your teams attention or visually represent what a task is for? Attach an image to the task and set it to show on the card. Boom! Your screenshot of that gnarly bug or sweet game asset will now be visible right on the card and easy to pick out at a glance.

Associate Tasks With Each Other

Sometimes you might want to refer to a task or to point out a duplicate. Or perhaps you want to define loose task dependencies to help you and your team know which tasks affect other tasks. Well, that’s now made easier as you can now create links between tasks. Do this by tagging a task with the number of any other task. These special hashtags automatically turn into links. Hover over one of these tags and you will see the card for the linked task. Tap on the card and you will immediately be taken to that task.

There is still a lot more coming! Continue letting us know how we can better serve you and your teams. We love making Unfuddle work better for you!