Microbrew Certified Partners
Team Members
- Sean
- Paul
- Wes
- scottymoon
What
“Lowdown” is a collaborative tool for writing and working with Cucumber. If Cucumber lets us “describe how software should behave in plain text… in a business-readable domain-specific language” then “Lowdown” is the tea party where thinly sliced sandwiches are served on nice platters… instead of trying to swallow it whole.
Where
- Entry URL:
- http://lowdownapp.com
How
RailsBoost.com Rails template generator
authlogic
authlogic-oid
builder
compass
compass-960-plugin
cucumber
diff-lcs
haml
haml-edge
hoe
mash
polyglot
ruby-openid
rubyforge
term-ansicolor
treetop
acts_as_list
asset_packager
open_id_authentication
rails 2.3.3
jquery
jquery-ui
jquery.livequery
jquery.template
jquery
Comments
Looks like this might be a good site, but anyone outside of the programming community can’t use it…which doesn’t make it all together useful.
@JPEG James We’re aware of that issue, thanks!
when you work on the CSS, you need to adjust some bottom padding issues. With the default “Tea Party” feature being inserted into the new project, I cannot get to the buttons on at the bottom of the page (It is covered by the ‘project totals’ footer.)
@zapnap We intend to have import/export soon (maybe even some git magic?) but we chose to focus on the interface for the competition. Hope to have your business when we relaunch!
You guys should combine efforts with the rakugoka project — I loved the gem / import workflow there. Yours, overall, is much prettier of course. They’re both great projects that I could actually use in my daily development once the kinks are ironed out. Nice work!
This is pretty awesome, you get my vote. pivotal tacker integration would have been killer
Just a reminder, if you run into the OpenId bug during signup, just use email and password until we can get that fixed. Thank you!
@manu lol. If only everyone thought that ;-). Thanks for voting!
you’ll win, so good!
The registration page said my email was already taken after I entered my Open ID. Then, I added that email anyway. And it worked. I don’t really have any experience with cucumber, so I don’t find this useful. The idea looks good though. Great job and good luck!
I thought it was a great idea…very helpful too!!
Wonderful Site! Found it very useful!!
Love the Site!!!
Stream of consciousness comments…
Great design on the public facing site, interaction inside the app needs some things addressed.
You need to work on the “blank slate” for new features/scenarios. Immediately adding some random title and text isn’t helpful. I was under the impression I couldn’t edit the title and was starting to get frustrated.
When creating a feature I immediately wanted to click in the title area to edit the feature name. It took me a minute to realize I had to edit it from within the text box inside the “form area”.
As a UI person I’d eliminate that “feature” box within. Follow the UI principle “input where you output” and allow editing where you’re showing the feature title.
Removing “lines” also shouldn’t have a javascript confirmation. That’s annoying and it’s not like it’s a huge destructive action. Your X icons are far enough off the main edit area that the intent of clicking is pre determined.
As someone new to Cucumber I’d also like some sort of introduction or “best practice” link from within the application to acclimate me to how these things should optimally be structured.
We were doing something like this the hard way. This makes things easier. As a project “owner” it keeps me focused in my writing of the stories.
Awesome application.
@brentsnook: that’s cool. Being able to run a rake task to run all your features and post the result back to the project is a great idea, similar to your post-to-a-remote server. I was curious how to hook into the cukes formatter, so I’ll check out your project in depth for sure.
Ambitious! Nice workflow, smooth UX. Need some more validation and testing – saved steps without hours and Edit button wouldn’t work, wandered around a bit, tried it, worked. Export is mandatory; that’s the point of writing cucumber, after all, is to get it into a testing framework. OpenID glitched, worked a second try. Tutorial video would have been nice, but, 48 hours. Useful only for development, just as iPhone app is useful only for owners, no downgrade there.
xoxo to you Paul! Congrats on this great app! Mindy
Love the fact that a dollar value sticks right out on the feature. You should build on this with more tools for prioritisation based on feature costs.
Site design is cool, front page with cute little men is nice and eyecatching.
To make this really useful to me you’d really need some way to have those features easily executed by Cucumber. I would also love to be able to see whether or not the features were currently passing/complete in the last build.
I’m looking at doing this using Google Wave although the bit that allows Cukes to pull in features from another source could be used by any system that adheres to a simple protocol. Keep an eye on http://github.com/brentsnook/bumps/ if you’re interested.
i don’t understand how use it
i’m not a developer .. how i use it?
@lucashungaro @fartiemctopolis IE testing is one of the last things we do when developing a webapp. It consumes too much time to fit in a 48hr competition.
if i’m not a developer, this is totally useless!
Nice work. Did hit the OpenID glitch, but the user/pass worked fine. This is a nice interface to Cuke that I could use with my customers. Great idea!
Thank you. We’ll definitely make sure it works in all the popular browsers moving forward. If you have any other ideas, feel free to ping us on twitter @lowdownapp.
Appearance lost points ‘cause some things doesn’t work on IE. Completeness is affected by some bugs. Anyway, great app overall, I would use it everyday.
i know you rails geeks don’t use IE, but 60+% of the internet does. this site does not work at all in IE. you need to redo your css.
@sueb try email/pass signup. There’s a bug with OpenId at this point
Concept seems fine, but I only got errors when I tried signing up. Too bad.
This is great. Export/import would be a big plus. I’d also like the ability to see a burn up/burn down chart to show the client progress over time. great job!
nice job guys!
`shields
It’s a bit cumbersome to work with, though I realize you had 48 hours to do it :)
Thanks for the feedback everyone. Tons of great ideas! We have several of those planned for our relaunch as soon as judging is complete and we are allowed to make changes. In the meantime, follow us on twitter @lowdownapp and we’ll keep everyone notified of our progress as we move forward.
If you hit a snag with OpenId signup (a but that we missed, unfortunately) standard email/pass signup should work fine.
I really think this is a great idea. The only ding I gave for completeness is that I agree that a preview would be good before you sign up and an export feature would be great as well.
Autofill for popular openid’s would be good, if you get the wrong URL it 500’s
Registration needs streamlining. Also there should be a demo of the site before registering. Two pretty major failings that meant I didn’t actually get my hands dirty with this one.
@foca. Awesome feedback, thanks so much.
it is a nice app, for sure (as rakugoka was). However, I hate cucumber (used it, never got it to click for me), so I’m in a difficult position to judge your app.
Cheers, and good luck! :D
lowdown rocks!
@m3talsmith I think that’s an interesting idea. That could possibly become a repository of solutions to common problems. ie. a github of testing. There’s a lot of possibilities for sure! Thanks again for voting everyone.
no innovation
i prefer use github
Probably the best app I’ve seen this year. I would definitely use this site. Great work!
@m3talsmith: We built Lowdown for ourselves. We all do client work and struggle with figuring out how to get our clients involved in the story process and how to show them that moving features around has a real cost in money and time.
How do you see public stories working in that context?
The thing that would complete this most is being able to share stories publicly and have a stream on the public side of new public stories being shared. Maybe a team or user view in that case too. This is usable and I would pay for it.
There was a bug that made it through with OpenId, but the email/password login and signup should work. We will have a quick bug-fix release as soon as judging is complete. Thanks for voting!
Great application guys, can’t wait to see all the possibilities this project could lead to.
In going over my other votes, this is my favorite app of the lot. Not too many comments, but awesome work, guys.
Looks great, great idea for a project management tool!
wow, this is great. i’m not a programmer, so i really like that i can type up what i want and give it to my developer. i can imagine going back and forth with my dev guy to get stuff ready and then arranging the milestones and checking them off. this could really change the way i work, so that’s really useful to me. simple but it does a lot.
i didn’t have any issues at all with it. i guess an export would be nice, but the plain text version is fine for me to copy/paste for now.
the design and looks are very nice. the auto calculation is really cool, too.
thanks!
@AndyV Thank you for the feedback. We definitely plan on adding some really great new features (we built it so we could use it too). Give us a follow on twitter @lowdownapp to get all the latest announcements as we move forward after the competition is over.
Had a lot of fun with this. It may have been a perfect storm moment as I’d just started toying with Cucumber…
+1 @Ivan. An import/export would be very helpful. It’s the one feature I looked for that I couldn’t find.
It might be worth downplaying/hiding the time estimation during feature creation. Seems like the tool could be very useful for a consultant to use with a client but the time est. would be distracting in that environment.
Thanks all for the comments. @ivan we’re already working on an enhanced version.
I wanted to switch the lowdownapp.com DNS entry to point at the new version, but that’s not feasible since our invitation emails in the Rumble version contain static URLs. Wait until next week!
I already started using it. Pretty awesome, really like it. You should keep it running after the rumble, and an import/export function would be nice.
Excellent application. Really simple to use and I can definitely see myself using it with other in the team to create stories/features.
Congratulations on the amazing effort and the great product.
This looks very good and has the makings of another excellent tool for development. I can see it fitting into the mix like github, tracker, lighthouse, etc have.
I really like this. Smart design and something I have been looking for for a while – you saved me to effort of making one myself!
Nooooo – you had the same idea as me: http://rakugoka.r09.railsrumble.com – although yours looks nicer! I didn’t really get round to having a more formal step input as you guys have, but I did manage to get a gem out to import features though.
Oh well, I guess neither of us will be winning any points for originality!