I think we’ve all had the experience of somebody asking or emailing, “Hey, what’s going on with DE4288?”. Unless I have been looking at that defect in the last 2 minutes, I have no idea what you’re talking about. For the longest time, I would open up the browser, navigate to our cloud based agile software development tracker, search around, eventually find what I’m looking for, and then ask you what it was you wanted. There had to be a better way! Using Automator (OS X only), I created a simple service that allows me to highlight a defect number (DE4288 for example) and it will open up Chrome and take me directly to the defect or user story. All it takes is this simple bash script:

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/usr/bin/open -a "/Applications/Google Chrome.app" https://rally1.rallydev.com/slm/rally.sp?#/search?keywords=$@

Obviously this specific example will only work with Rally, but I think the idea remains the same – Rather than just focusing on ‘automating’ your checks, why not automate repetitive things that annoy you.

My second tip uses a piece of software called Text Expander (also OS X only). Using their formatted text snippet builder, whenever I type ‘bbug’, a little window pops up with a form that looks like this:

Which after I’m done, formats to something looking like this:

I’ve found this is a really nice way to have consistent looking steps to reproduce and makes sure I have at least the bare minimum defect logged for the developer.