How to organize hardware & software development in Fibery

As a startup, we didn’t actually organize our projects using any paid tools yet. Instead, we had all of these Excel sheets, which were scattered all over the place. We started out by looking for a way to keep track of our Kanban, as well as organize our requirements better. We used Trello (free tier) for a while, but we outgrew that pretty fast.

We started looking into a bunch of tools, but when we found out about Fibery, we decided to take the plunge (this page took away our final doubts). From there, we basically realized the functionalities Fibery had and started formalizing process after process to run on Fibery. Other software tools never stood a chance ;)

From a technical standpoint, once a Sprint has been planned, software development starts. We use mostly Linux, Git, VSCode, Docker and a few other tools for our software development. E.g. for our embedded development, we use a Remote Container which houses our entire dev environment for the embedded side, simplifying setup and maintenance. When sensible, work is committed to git, and when pushed, a Gitlab CI/CD pipeline runs some build and test things (and also e.g. a security scan), and a build artifact (Docker image) is ready if everything passes. Eventually a merge request is created for a branch implementing some Feature, and it gets merged to develop/master/etc. We use git-flow as a branching model. We have AWS for our cloud hosting, which has our Django backend, and after a successful merge to e.g. master, a new container of the resulting image is deployed on ECS.

How do you store a development wiki?

We store some of our development info in docs. We have also used Fibery whiteboards, but a team member once accidentally removed a large amount of data from the whiteboards and then spent time remaking them with inaccurate info. We never really got back into using whiteboards since.

Note: This was not a fault of or due to the whiteboards, but solely of said user. At the time, reorganizing Entities/Databases was a bit more error-prone/buggy than now, and it resulted in the user deleting one of those Databases which they thought to be empty. One view showed no more of those entities, but they only later realized that it had a filter active. Deleting those entities also deleted the visualizations of them on that whiteboard, as well as its visual links to other entities. Currently, we use Sticky Notes a lot on those whiteboards, so as not to interfere with “actual data”.

It gives us the freedom of an Excel sheet, with the capability of a professional workflow tool. Really it’s the board functionality that is most useful, due to how we can sort it and visualize it, in addition to that we can put all of the info in the same place, instead of scattered over different Excel sheets over different folders.

Our software engineer specifically likes how it connects information, both structured and unstructured. Providing the ability to fully create your own structure in the form of Databases, fields, automations, action buttons, etc, is also a joy to use and setup. It’s fast, consistent, and allows the convergence of information in one single place. So they would say that their favorite feature of Fibery would be its nearly complete customizability.

Of course, bi-directional links, automations, reports, its intuitiveness (once you get it) is also really great.

The new multi-pane view is also really, really useful, we can no longer do without it. We are also really glad with the Audit Log and Thrash Bin features. We only wish we’d had those sooner :)

A couple of things we noticed (some with links to the Fibery forum), in order of importance:

• Polymorphic relations. Very useful to link entities to others without having to create individual, “duplicated” relations between them.
• Also, if applicable, automation rules which could be shared across multiple Entities without having to copy/paste them. Perhaps inheritance or something similar could be done…
• Validation rules on the Fields of an Entity. Being able to mark something as required is a nice first step.
• Currently, Rich-Text fields are exempt from Filters and Automations (and therefore also Reports). Adding this would be really useful. For instance, we cannot use automations/reports right now to visualize how often a rich-text field has been filled in.
• Improved history tracking for documents, to see changes more easily. In that same area, the Audit Log is also really great, as well as the history button for an entity.
• A (automatic but customizable) graph view to represent a plethora of things, such as dependencies, installation steps, etc.
• Every week, we manually back up the most important sheets (export table), but we would like to be able to backup everything automatically, in case Fibery somehow becomes inaccessible to us, for whatever reason.

• The timeline feature is difficult to work with

  • It’s difficult to go backwards and forwards in time
  • The current day/week/month is difficult to spot
  • It’s not possible to create multiple levels of lanes (e.g. Epics > Stories > Sub-tasks)
• The multi-panel navigation is great! I only wish that when you click/open the first entity, it opens in a half pane similar to when you have 2 entities open. The first half pane can then show the current view in its entirety. I am quite sure you have considered this in some form or another, so I was hoping to have this as a user-defined (or even device-defined) setting or something. When you click a second entity, the split-pane navigation is perfect as-is.

Finally, I am greatly anticipating the blocks feature! I hope that this also extends to views, so we can create truly custom views! Perhaps a Board view, prefaced by a little bit of text. Endless possibilities.

Also, a general thing you should know. The amount of customization that Fibery offers also leads to a high amount of discussions in the team as to how Fibery should be organized. Everyone wants it to work as they prefer, but there is so much that is possible, that we continuously bicker about minute details of how things are organized.