hedgehoglab

Yesterday, Sarat and I were doing some pair programming on our new but shockingly large 37" LCD TV that's on the wall in our fancy meeting space in the lab.

Pair programming is fun and you learn a hell of a lot! If you want to know more about why this is the case, I suggest you read this great article by Obie Fernandez.

We were ironing out some bugs for the fixx 1.7 release, and I had a filter set-up to give me all the issues that had to be resolved for that particular release. As a result I was jumping back and forth from the filtered list of issues, to the full view of the issue we were currently working on.

It was in this process that Sarat made, what seemed to be an odd observation at the time; that I was doing things wrong. I couldn't understand how, as fixx is made to be simple. I went back to the Dashboard and proceeded to click on my "fixx 1.7" filter to go back to the list of issues we were working on.

Sarat then noted "You do realise you could have got back to that list by pressing the Issues tab, rather than navigating back to the Dashboard and invoking your filter...right?".

Obviously I was not aware of this, and feverishly tried it out to find out he was right. Of course he's right; he wrote it!

fixx remembers your last used filter no matter where you go in fixx, and when you return back to the Issues tab presents the list of issues from the last filter. Even if you apply a temporary filter without saving it, the results of that filter are remembered in your session, and can be viewed once again when you return to the Issues tab.

It's evident that I was in need of this piece of functionality, as issue tracking should not by obtrusive by any means, and it turned out to be there all along but I just wasn't aware of it being the new guy in the lab HQ. You can tell that a lot of thought gone into the design and functionality in fixx, and the more I think about it, the more it makes complete sense. As a result this is one gem I want to share.

You're either going to read this and think, how on earth did he not know that, or you're going to go away and try it out for yourself and increase your productivity. Either way I'm happier that I am now aware of this, and hope that it manages to have an impact on the way a few of you use fixx.

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