Product collaboration with Sprint.ly

sprintly.png

Sprint.ly is an innovative product collaboration tool for companies that build software products. it provide an open, transparent, and easy way for the entire team to participate in the creation process.

Introduction

Sprint.ly opened their private beta in December of 2011 and is a new tool that enables businesses to collaborate when building software. Graham Blache from Sprint.ly explained how their product aims to solve the lack of communication and transparency in the software development process that so often leads to frustration and huge losses in productivity.

What does your app do, and what problems does it solve for your users?

Sprint.ly is an innovative collaboration tool for companies that build software products. We provide an open, transparent, and easy way for the entire team to participate in the creation process. For instance, one of our largest customers has their entire sales team using Sprint.ly to create new stories from customer feedback and to help the developers build features that the customers are asking for.

Sprintly1.jpeg

We use Pusher to power our real-time updating and to increase performance by constantly updating our local data model to prevent the need for remote fetching.

Have you got any technical tips or code that could help other Pusherinos?

By using Backbone.js I was able to drop in the Pusher client library and have a working proof of concept in about 30 minutes.

On the backend we use Django post-save signals to push JSON blobs of created, updated or deleted models to Amazon SQS and Celery to send them out to Pusher. On the front-end we listen for Pusher events, grab a reference to the model in the event from our model factory and update its attributes. The rest of the application listens for changes and updates itself accordingly. It couldn’t be any easier!

The first time I hit ‘complete’ on a Sprint.ly item in one window and watched it jump to the ‘completed’ column in another I just about jumped out of my seat.