TechMachinery Labs

Challenges before adopting Space

What made you look for Space or alternative solutions?

As a startup, we have a mix of full-time and part-time employees. Apart from that, we also have contractors and interns, and some of them are non-technical.

We needed a tool or tools for collaboration in this heterogeneous team. Since we are a technology company, we wanted the tool(s) to take care of the usual things – communication, code repositories, code reviews, Agile-based development, and so on.

Did you consider any other solutions as an alternative to Space?

Before moving to Space, I looked at the following tools, among others:

1. Slack for communication
2. GitHub, GitLab, AWS CodeCommit for repositories
3. GitLab and few other tools for code reviews
4. Various bug tracking tools
5. RedMine, which can take care of many of these things

How was your collaboration process organized before? Which areas or steps of your process were missing/challenging/problematic? Was it related to the changes in your business or company transformation (like rapid growth)?

We were using Slack very effectively. For code repos, we were also using AWS CodeCommit. Things were working fine, as most of our work was MVP without paying customers. When we got paying customers and the heterogenous team had to grow, the existing tools became bottlenecks in terms of easy management and integration. So indeed, a part of this shift was related to the changes in our business and company growth.

Why Space?

Why did your team decide to use Space?

In short, it replaced multiple tools and reduced our overhead by a great deal.

What are the key benefits you get from using it?

• Single collaboration tool
• Fully integrated environment for all our collaboration needs
• Easy to administer and manage

Have you solved the issues you have identified in your process with Space? What has changed? Please describe your case study.

The main issue we solved is that we replaced multiple existing and future tools with a single collaboration tool. Plus, it removed all of the admin and maintenance overheads for us.

Feedback

Describe your experience during the adoption period. Was Space hard to get used to?

It was super easy to get used to. Moreover, I’ve been collaborating with CodeOps for many years now. They helped me with any questions I had, which made it very easy to adopt Space.

Is there anything you would like to improve in Space (e.g. any important features that are missing, usability problems, etc.)?

I have been contributing to the development of Space by submitting bug and feature requests to YouTrack. Some of the key ones are:

• Private projects in the Team plan or as an add-on to the Team plan.
• Guest users / View-only users – being able to add a few free or low cost guest users would be ideal for any startup, as we do have users who are just observers.
• Summary of users – a single report which shows everything about each of the users in a consolidated way.