• Discovery workshop 101: Plan your next project in a flash

    First impressions matter. By carefully planning a discovery workshop for your project, you can ensure that you’ll hit the ground running and that everyone is equally invested in, approving of, and informed about the project’s goals and next steps. Over the years, we’ve had a lot of experience organizing discovery meetings and workshops.

  • Migrating Animals

    Inside a massive migration from Redmine to Harvest and JIRA

    Here at Alley, we’ve recently completed a six-month project to migrate from Redmine to JIRA for issue tracking and project management. Migrating hundreds of users, tens of thousands of issues, and hundreds of thousands of comments is a daunting task, but we managed it without disrupting our projects, clients, or day-to-day work.

  • The efficacy of brevity: A short, handy, easy-to-read guide on making the decision to use as few words as humanly possible to communicate and convey your ideas, concerns and questions

    How annoying is that title? If you answered “pretty annoying” or “super annoying,” you are correct. Using more words than necessary or using a ten-dollar word when a five-cent word would suffice is not a new problem. This scourge on humanity predates the written word. When coupled with corporate buzzwords, language loses meaning and one’s…

  • In progress section of a kanban board

    Alley’s Redmine task board

    At Alley, we use Kanban to manage software development. (For more on exactly what Kanban is and how we use it at Alley, check out this post.) However, we quickly realized that Kanban at Alley was going to be fairly complicated to implement so we built a plugin for Redmine, our project management system. This plugin,…