(Left: Damon Cali at Cornstalks Demo Night. Photo by Danny Schreiber.)
This is the third post in a six-post series recapping the demonstrations that took place at Thursday’s Cornstalks Demo Night. To learn more about the event, see our post, “These six startups will present at tonight’s Cornstalks Demo Night.”
Damon Cali doesn’t mince words when it comes to the quality of bug-tracking systems he’s used over the years. Cali tried his fair share of free solutions in his previous job at a startup in Austin, Texas, and it didn’t take him long to decide that “they’re almost universally horrible.”
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Out of Cali’s dissatisfaction, TrackJumper was born. Cali demonstrated TrackJumper, an online bug-tracking software, on Thursday.
Upon opening the TrackJumper dashboard, Cali made an admission. “One of my sort of tenets of doing this (is) if it’s worth doing, it’s worh stealing,” he said. “I borrowed a lot of the style from Apple, obviously – it looks a lot like my iPhone. I borrowed the interface in general from Google Reader, because that worked for me.”
In that design and the functionality of the site, simplicity is a major point of emphasis. As Cali showed, creating a bug ticket is as easy as typing into a text field, “Text Ticket.” That opens up another text field, “Description,” for more details. Bugs can be prioritized in a list by dragging and dropping, and they can be flagged for level of importance. But Cali emphasized that the bug-submission process is only as involved as the user wants or needs it to be.
“It’s very freeform,” he said. “It doesn’t force you to do anything, but it gives you a lot of hooks that you can use to use your own system and your own process, the way your team works best together. It provides enough structure but not so much that it’s suffocating.”
Cali demonstrated the steps involved in creating a new project and a new user — a user needs to enter just a name, email address and password — and adding or subtracting users from a project. TrackJumper enables users to create tabs for separate projects and seamlessly jump back and forth between those projects. All the while, project administrators control what other users have access to a given project.
Cali announced his intention to give every team at Startup Weekend Omaha a free one-year subscription to TrackJumper. Beyond that, he said, future plans for the project revolve around ease of use.
“The path forward is more than this,” Cali said. “But I have the philosophy going forward that I’m going to add features that don’t increase complexity — add functionality but don’t create … the congiitive load on your brain to use the software.”
