Digestive.io is our latest side project. It helps project managers with their daunting, but necessary, weekly progress report updates. So far, internally, our project managers save on average 4 hours per week since we’ve built the tool!
We’ve created Digestive.io in an effort to consolidate our transparency towards our clients and team members.
So what is Digestive.io and what does it do?
At heart, Digestive is a very simple application. It connects with your everyday tools like Pivotal Tracker or Github, and periodically checks for your team progress.
Those periodical checks, will automatically create a weekly progress report containing all your integrations’ key data.
From the simple ones, like the number of errors reported by Airbrake or Bugsnag on each environment, to the more complex ones.
The Github integration will check for opened and closed issues as well as proposed and merged pull requests, and create a Pulse-like card.
The Pivotal Tracker integration will group your Started and Finished stories into an ‘In Progress’ bucket, and your Delivered and Accepted cards into a ‘Done’ bucket. It will also attach the action date and time, allowing you to spot any stuck stories.
Stories still in a delivered state, but delivered before the report period will be grouped independently, notifying the project owner that they need to act on them.
And finally, the Pivotal Tracker integration will analyse your next release, giving you insights on what progress needs to be done to meet your deadlines.
All the integration analysis will be grouped into a single report, ready to be sent to your client, team or key stakeholders. It’s also worth noting that you can stack multiple integrations of the same type. So if you manage a few open source projects, you can get all your project Pulse cards in one go!
Hang on, you are going to store my API keys? Is that secure?
Short answer is yes, we’ve come up with a rotating encryption mechanism that give us more than one hundred different combinations. You can read about it on one of Rob’s previous blog post.
What does the report looks like and how is it sent?
The report is made to be interactive, with important elements always visible, and less important elements collapsed to avoid cluttering the view.
You can view one of one of our old report.
This report can be sent directly from the application with a simple click, to any of your contacts.
How has it saved us 4 hours per week?
Gemma, our project manager sends weekly progress reports for each of our projects. This progress report is made available for the client, development team and management team.
On average, Gemma alternates between 2 to 3 projects.
So every week, usually on a Friday afternoon, she would have to log into each external tool, manually collect the progress data, and write all this into a Basecamp / email message.
Needless to say that it was a time-consuming, mind-crushing process, especially for large projects where multiple developers might be involved.
Today, Gemma only needs to connect to Digestive.io, and press the ‘send via email’ button on each of her projects. This takes maybe 1 minute in total for each project.
She knows that a progress report will be sent, with the latest accurate data, directly to everyone involved in the project.
It couldn’t be simpler.
