Alfred

Project Alfred is an experiment in status reporting and accountability tracking for small teams.

Background

Regular meetings with roundtable status updates are great for teams which strive to be efficient and transparent. However the process of editing a status update is tedious and repetitive. Furthermore most tools used for collecting updates (e.g. wiki) offer no way to track an evolution of an update. If something was reported to be a struggle one week, what happens to it the following week?

Goals

• Create a dashboard for viewing weekly status reports.
• Design a workflow for rolling updates over to the following week.
• Allow an easy data input via a chat bot.
• Integrate the dashboard with Bugzilla and GitHub.

Non-goals

• Create a project management tool.
• Create a to-do app.

Design Philosophy

Using the vocabulary of https://polidea.com/deck.

• Reactive, not pro-active: All interactions with the app are intiated by users.
• Automatic, not smart: The app does little or no data processing beyond what is initiated by the user.
• Serious, not playful: The app’s visuals and tone of voice are serious.
• Native, not custom: The app’s structure and information architecture adheres to platform-specific guidelines.

The user should interact with it in the most frictionless way possible. Some user input is better than no input at all. Alfred doesn't get in the way and tries to be as helpful as possible — but without nagging the user.

Overview

Alfred's architecture consists of three components:

• an API server connected to a MongoDB instance,
• an IRC bot,
• a React front-end.

Roadmap

Alfred is in very early stages of development. Consult https://github.com/stasm/alfred/milestones for more information about the current status and release planning.