Socratic now shows you the distribution of time worked for any period you select—a capability we call Allocation.

Allocation is useful for understanding how worked time aligns to company priorities. It’s also valuable in accounting for software capitalization costs. With Allocation you can see, for any time period, the percentage of time invested by person and type of work (e.g. new development versus bug fix or maintenance).

Learn more →

Fixes & enhancements

Connect more than a single group in GitLab. We now support nested groups and projects allowing for a more robust integration to match your company’s organization.

Fixes & enhancements

All plans and objectives in Socratic now have a new layer of intelligence: Momentum. The aim of momentum is to show you at a glance what work is moving, versus stalling or regressing. Momentum complements the progress bar by showing how progress has changed with the latest work activity.

The momentums states are:

Momentum is also surfaced for all views, teams, and locations.

Fixes & enhancements

We’ve added more hints for first-time users, to help get new team members using Socratic’s data to the fullest!

Fixes & enhancements

Socratic search (cmd + k) now automatically surfaces your most recently viewed tasks. Meant to comment on or add edits to a task, but can’t recall its title or contents? We’ve got you covered!

Fixes & enhancements

You can now export to CSV any set of tasks in Socratic. Go to any list mode in the app (e.g. My tasks, workstream / List, All tasks, etc.), and click the export icon in the lower right.

You can use filters to set a specific body of tasks, as well as the list column sorter to choose which columns to include or exclude in your export.

(Our weekly use case for this feature is the production of this changelog. We can now use our changelog view to export all tasks and their titles in easily editable format.)

Fixes & enhancements

We’ve enhanced the modal for creating tasks. In addition to phase, objective, and assignee, the new modal includes the ability to add a task description, as well as any labels.

We’ve also added a “Create more” toggle, if you want to create more than one task without having to reopen the modal.

Fixes & enhancements

We’ve expanded our available shortcut keys to cover primary app navigation, and essential actions like global search and inviting teammates. To see the full list, go to Help & Support (g+h).

Fixes & enhancements

Timed to general availability, Socratic 2.0 is here. This includes:

In fact, there’s so damn much new great stuff, we recorded a video to give a flavor of it all.

Understand delivery time, spot bottlenecks for plan objectives

We’ve added a new question & answer to the Objectives section of Trends: “Where are our bottlenecks for plan objectives?”

This shows:

Fixes & enhancements

New code insights: see trends in pull request throughput, and time to merge

For customers using Socratic’s git integration, you can now see coding trends over time. The new Code section in Trends answers:

In each case, you can click through the chart to see all pull requests and repositories involved.

Fixes & enhancements

Enhanced Plans board & objective cards

New objectives can now be created directly from the board, by clicking the plus (+) in the header of any plan phase. This create works identically to task create on workstream boards: a new, blank objective card is added with cursor active for objective title. Pressing enter creates the objective; pressing esc cancels the create. On enter, we also automatically generate another blank objective card for quick creation of multiple objectives on the board.

Additionally, objective cards now show a status bar reflecting percent of tasks complete, with color coding as follows:

See the trend of open defects over time

We’ve added a new question to the Demand section of Trends: “Are open defects growing?” To answer, we compare the number of open defects at the end of the period you select, compared to the number of open defects at the end of the three prior periods.

Fixes & enhancements

Date Picker for Activity and Trends

In addition to the existing presets, you can now apply custom date ranges when looking at Trends, or the Activity for views and workstreams. Especially handy for those whose fiscal quarters don’t follow calendar quarters, and for creating changelogs specific to your release cadence.

Fixes & enhancements

For users of Plans (a beta capability feature-flagged to certain customers):

New Objective Detail

Given the popularity and importance of Objectives, we’ve enhanced the detail slide-out. Primary improvements:

We’ve also repositioned and expanded Objective health data. The attributes section of the new slide-out shows:

SOC 2

We’ve achieved SOC 2 Type I compliance in accordance with American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) standards for SOC for Service Organizations. This affirms our investments, which include formal policies and automated monitoring, to ensure a modern, responsive, and compliant security profile.

If you’d like a copy of the report (and who wouldn’t?), please email security@socraticworks.com.

Fixes & enhancements

For users of Plans:

Global labels, custom colors

Previously, labels were defined per workstream (an effort to mitigate label sprawl). But in the case of tasks moving from one workstream to another, their labels wouldn’t easily carry across.

Now, labels are defined globally and available to all workstreams. You can also assign color to your labels. Select from one of the color options or add your own—simply enter the hex color code.

To add or edit labels, open settings by clicking on the ellipsis (…) in the upper-right of the app, and choose Labels. (You can also create new labels directly from task detail, as before.)

Fixes & enhancement

Expanded Activity filter

The Activity mode for workstreams now surfaces task archive events, as well as tasks moves into or out of a workstream. To see:

Fixes & enhancement

Enriched task detail—including lightbox view of images

We’ve enhanced task detail to meet a number of customer requests, as well as to align more closely with our design system.

Highlights:

You’ll also notice a streamlined task attributes section, with updated icons.

Fixes & enhancement

Operators for board filters

Board filters now include and / or operators for more control over filtering of tasks. Previously, multiple filters implied an and relationship among them. Now you can specify the operator relationship to apply to the selected filters.

The operator select will automatically appear when more than one filter criteria is active.

Fixes & enhancements

Spot workflow exceptions across larger bodies of work

You can now use Views to see workflow exceptions across any body of work. The same interrupted states that we surface on workstreams—blocked, idle, rework, and deprioritized—are now available as filter criteria on Views.

Fixes & enhancements

Task flow across workstreams

When a Done task is moved from one workstream to another, we now auto-set its work phase to To Do (or whatever the first phase) in the receiving workstream.

Previously, moving a Done task from one workstream to another preserved its Done state. This meant that the receiving workstream would need to shift the task from Done back to an active work phase, in the process triggering rework.

With this enhancement, tasks can move among workstreams—say, from a design workstream to an engineering one—as work is completed in one and ready for work in another, with all relevant flow data preserved for each workstream.

Fixes & enhancements

Productboard integration

Socratic now integrates with Productboard. With Socratic connected to Productboard, you can link Socratic objectives to Productboard features for a real-time view of progress within Productboard.

Fixes & enhancements

Create tasks from Slack

Our Slack integration now allows for the creation of tasks directly from Slack. To create a task, you can use either the slash command /task, or choose the 'More actions' button (three vertical dots) on any Slack message.

Note:

This enables, for example, the ability for help desk teams—or even end users, in the case of community Slack channels—to raise tasks in Socratic, without needing access to or even knowledge of Socratic.

For this use case, you might create a default workstream (e.g. “Triage”) to receive any Slack-generated tasks. Those tasks could then be prioritized and assigned to people and/or other workstreams within Socratic.

CSV import

In addition to Jira Import and Replay, you can now import tasks via CSV. This version supports CSV files exported from Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse); other systems will follow based on demand.

To import from CSV, simply choose New workstream on the all work view and then Import from CSV.

Fixes & enhancements

Learn how well you plan

For teams that use cycles, you can now see trends in cycle planning over time. We’ve added a new section to Trends, called “Planning,” that analyzes your cycle data and compares it to prior periods to answer these questions:

Each trend bar links to the included cycles, and their corresponding retrospective health card.

Fixes & enhancements

Public API (v1): Create new tasks from any system

You can now create new tasks from outside Socratic, using our public API. This initial version of the API lets you set:

For example, you might create a simple help desk web form that allows end users to enter a name and description of their issue, while defaulting the workstream and work phase values (e.g. “Engineering” and “To Do”) according to your own work routing rules.

See the Swagger doc here.

Fixes & enhancements

Fixes & enhancements

Announcing: Jira Import and Jira Replay

You can now import Jira issues and epics into Socratic. But as the old commercials say, that’s not all! You can also optionally "replay" the history of work in your Jira Cloud projects as though it had occurred in Socratic.

With Jira Replay, you can see all of Socratic's work health intelligence—forecast, average historical efforts, workload distribution, as well as comprehensive Trends—built entirely from the Jira record.

To access, simply click to add a new workstream on the Work view, and then choose “Import from Jira”.

Fixes & enhancements

Streamlined notifications

With the ability to subscribe to tasks, we’ve streamlined the notifications that appear in your personalized Action Items. Task creators and assignees will now see only one set of notification on tasks to which they’re also subscribed.

Fixes & enhancements

New & improved task list view

Last week’s task card makeover has been extended to list view. To manage existing blocking relationships directly from the card, click either the blocked or blocking icon. To add blocking relationships, choose the quick edit icon (...) on the right-hand of the card (just as before).

Fixes & enhancements

Follow the work that matters to you

You can now choose to follow any task in Socratic. By clicking the star icon over the task properties section, you’ll automatically be notified whenever:

Notifications appear in your Action Items, as well as Slack / email based on your preferences.

New task cards for the New Year

We’ve given task cards a makeover to convey more information in less space:

Fixes & enhancements

Fixes & enhancements

Understand where your engineering time is going

It's the end of the quarter (or the month, or the year...), and you'd naturally like to know how your actual time spent lines up with, for example, the stated quarterly objectives. Normally, answering this is some mix of guesstimates, spreadsheets, maybe even the horror of time tracking 🤦‍♂️.

But not with Socratic. Our latest Trends feature answers the question: Where did we spend our time?

Trends now lets you see instantly and automatically where engineering time has been spent, and how that compares to the prior periods. You can see the breakdown by:

👉  For each, you can also see how time was distributed by person.

Move objectives between workstreams

You can now move objectives between workstreams. To move:

Upon moving an objective, all its tasks as well as any sub-objectives will move to the workstream you choose.

Fixes & enhancements

A faster, more responsive board—even at large scale

We've enhanced the way we retrieve and render the task board, which makes response times even quicker. We've also streamlined the events that populate health cards, meaning a faster and more efficient rendering of the health of work.

Fixes & enhancements

See where your bottlenecks are

We've added a new question & answer in Trends: Where are our bottlenecks?

To answer this question, we analyze and show the work phase that had the longest average time in phase for tasks, across all your workstreams. You can click on any phase to see the actual time in phase for each task.

Fixes & enhancements

Bulk archival of (ancient) backlog tasks

Maybe this sounds familiar...

You add new requests and ideas to the backlog with the best of intentions. Then a week becomes a month, and a month becomes a quarter. Meanwhile, those tasks have been buried under sedimentary layers of other tasks.

The truth is, even the best groomed backlogs will occasionally need a reset—a way of clearing out old layers.

In Socratic, you can now bulk archive backlog tasks, based on the age of the task. Just click the ellipsis (...) at the top of any backlog column, and choose by age grouping the tasks you want cleared.

Clearing aged backlog tasks has the benefit of reducing the identified scope for a workstream, and generating a better, more realistic forecast for the time to complete remaining work.

Remember: you can always search and restore archived tasks via the Command Menu (cmd + K).

Fixes & enhancements

New and improved forecast

We've refactored the way we calculate the automated forecast. In the prior version, forecast involved analyzing every task in a body of work, determining which single task was the long pole, and building the total forecast accordingly.

While statistically valid, this approach had two downsides. First, it tended to create overly conservative forecasts. Second, it meant that adding or removing tasks from scope wouldn't necessarily change the forecast, which is counterintuitive.

The new forecast works by analyzing:

Fixes & enhancements

See Trends for Teams and Locations

Combining our two latest capabilities, you can now filter Trends by Teams and/or Locations. This lets you see all the key Trend questions answered for a specific team or geographic area.

Fixes & enhancements

Introducing: Teams and Locations

We're introducing two new views: Teams, and Locations. With these, you can see aggregated Socratic health data (workload, progress, forecast) for any grouping of people.

You can also nest relationships. For example, you might create a team called Engineering that consists of three other teams, Frontend, Backend, and Integrations. Or a Location called USA, which consists of locations for Washington, California, and Texas.

People can be included as part of any number of Teams and/or Locations.

A new look for overviews

Workstreams, Views, Objectives, Teams, and Locations now follow the same, revamped UI treatment. This enhanced treatment provides:

With this new experience, the aim is a more informative, more useable way of seeing and understanding the bigger picture.

Fixes & enhancements

Improved dropdown selects

As part of ongoing alignment with our design system, we've marked the selected the option in task property dropdowns. An especially useful tweak when viewing tasks in list mode, as you can now see which phase a task is in by hovering on the phase icon. (It's the little things...)

Fixes & enhancements

Announcing: Trends

We're formally taking the wraps off Trends (previously in alpha), with a revamped design for better usability. Trends provides analysis of historical data to answer key questions such as:

Each question compares the selected period to prior period to show the trend. For each, we also provide trend analysis, and links to any related questions. (In cases of no data for the selected period, we show watermarked sample data.)

Go to Trends using the top nav, or by typing g+t from anywhere in the app.

Fixes & enhancements

A more direct route to settings

We've promoted the settings sub-categories to the main settings button. This means fewer clicks, and clearer placement for new users. The keyboard shortcut for settings, o + s, remains context-sensitive to the active screen.

Fixes & enhancements

Fixes & enhancements

A quick way to see completed tasks by age

We've added a histogram to the Done phase column. As with backlog phases, the age ranges act as filters. The aim is a quick way view tasks completed within the last three months.

For deeper analysis of past work, the Activity mode gives a rich set of filterable work data, by both task and code.

See cross-workstream work by specific phase

Previously when in Views, work phases were abstracted to their work category—Backlog, To Do, Doing, Done. This is because a View may contain multiple workstreams with multiple different phases. Based on feedback, we've added the specific phases under each category.

Fixes & enhancements

See and manage task dependencies directly from the board

You can now visualize blocking relationships and add new ones for any task, directly from the board. This enhancement carries over most of the Critical path capability, but keeps you in board context rather than going to a different mode.

There are two ways to activate the modal:

Fixes & enhancements

Receive and reply to Action Items via Slack

Socratic now supports notification via Slack. Any message that appears in your Action Items can also optionally be sent to Slack, with a link to the relevant task, and the ability to reply directly from Slack.

To activate for your org:

Each team member can then personally opt in or out of Slack notifications. Just open settings, and choose Profile from the top nav.

A better, more personalized calculation for task effort

We've brought a more accurate, more personalized approach to calculating task effort. The prior version used a mix of personal and workstream historical averages. Now, the historical average for every phase is personalized to the assignee.

Fixes & enhancements

Faster load times

The chief enhancement this week is app performance. These improvements may be more or less noticeable depending on your geography, but everyone should see quicker load times. We'll keep chopping away at it...

Fixes & enhancements

Critical path: see task dependencies and total forecast time to complete

Socratic's Critical Path mode visualizes the blocking relationships among tasks, and shows how those dependencies affect the projected time to complete the work.

Here, each task in the workstream is shown with its projected time to complete, as based on Socratic's analysis of historical actuals. This projection includes not only time for the task itself, but also the sum of projected time for any tasks that block it.

Fixes & enhancements

Fixes & enhancements

Email notification for Action Items

Action Item notifications can now also be received in email. To enable email notification:

With this activated, you'll receive an email (with link to the respective task) for any notification that also appears as an Action Item.

Fixes & enhancements

More robust user management

You can now easily add or remove team members:

From here you can add new users, deactivate current users, or change the assigned email for any user.

A better layout for task detail

Based on feedback, we've revised the layout of task detail. The aim is fewer tabs, and a more coherent grouping of properties:

Clicking any related or blocking task will now open that task in view, instead of opening a new tab and reloading the app.

Fixes & enhancements

Customizable task cards

You can now choose the properties you'd like to see displayed on your task cards. Each property becomes an activated part of the card, letting you view or change the property directly from the card itself.

Task cards also now include a quick edit capability, marked by the ellipsis (...). The quick edit lets you mark a task as critical, blocked, a defect—or just about any other action.

A smarter Balance for teams working in cycles

With Balance you set an ideal workload (in days) for your workstream, and Socratic computes how effort is distributed by person against that target.

In dateless work, such as kanban, this target remains fixed. But a fixed workload target makes less sense for teams working in cycles. This is because having a workload of, say, seven days may be fine at the beginning of a cycle—but it's a problem if you have seven days of work the day before the cycle is due to finish!

For this reason, for teams working in cycles, Socratic now automatically adjusts the ideal workload based on days remaining in the cycle. When in cycle view, each person's balance is now also reflective of work in that cycle (versus all work assigned).

Fixes & enhancements

Streamlined health card for cycle retrospectives

For teams using cycles, there's now an enhanced health card to drive your retrospectives. The cycle health card surfaces total planned scope against total delivered work—essentially, your say:do ratio—and shows how that compares to your average from the past four cycles.

For both scoped and delivered work, we show a breakdown by:

We also show total effort delivered for the cycle, as well as the number of tasks marked as defect.

By clicking on any section or sections of the bars, you can see the corresponding tasks in the detail below.

Backlog joins the board

We've promoted the backlog from it's drawer-like space on the left onto the board itself. Based on customer feedback, this should make it easier to see, manage, and move backlog tasks.

To open backlog, type o then b:

With backlog as part of the board, all board options—filters, search, list view, etc—extend to your backlog phases as well. The histogram filter persists at the top of any backlog phase.

Move tasks between workstreams

You can now move tasks from one workstream to another:

Fixes & enhancements

Announcing: Contributions (preview)

We've added a new tab to the Personal view: Contributions. With Contributions, you can see a history of all your work, with data for average workload, task duration, and distributions by workstream and work type.

If you're using Socratic's Git integration, you can also see a history of pull requests reviewed and merged, with distributions by repository, review time, and merge time.

To see your Contributions:

Fixes & enhancements

Announcing: Objectives

We've launched a new capability: Objectives. Objectives provides a way to group tasks toward some larger goal.

With Objectives, you can see the health, progress, and forecast time to complete for a specific collection of tasks. You can also nest one or many Objectives inside a larger Objective—very similar to stories and epics.

To create an Objective, choose Objectives from the dropdown select on your workstream (keyboard shortcut: v then o). From there click the plus (+) to add an Objective.

Fixes & enhancements

Zapier integration

You can now build automated workflows between connected apps and Socratic using Zapier. This integration allows you to trigger the creation of a new Socratic task based on the action(s) you define for the connected app.

A quicker way to switch between tasks

The task key in task details now also functions as a drop list showing the other tasks in the workstream, allowing you to quickly move from the details of one task to the next.

Fixes & enhancements

An enriched view of automated task effort

We've expanded the way we show task effort, which is calculated by Socratic based on your historical actuals. With this enhancement:

When assigning a projected time, Socratic uses the richest historical actuals available. So:

If a task's assignee changes as the task moves across phases—say, from a developer (phase e.g. "Doing") to a tester (phase e.g. "In Review")—we apply the time in each phase to the respective assignee.

Shortcut keys means less mousing around

We've added shortcut keys for most primary actions within the app. To summon the menu of available shortcuts, simply type ?

We've also added additional shortcut app navigation—Go to...—as an option from the command menu.

Fixes & enhancements

A richer Balance graph

We've made two enhancements to the Balance graph:

Fixes & enhancements

See backlog tasks by age

Backlog now has a histogram. The age ranges also act as filters. These age filters can be used together with the other backlog filters, so you can see, for example, tasks of a certain label(s) and certain age.

Simpler, saner URLs

We've removed the UUID from the app URL, and simplified down to entity names and keys. This should aid readability, and direct navigation via browser.

Fixes & enhancements

A histogram for completed tasks, by effort

When you filter by completed tasks on the workstream Activity view, you'll now see a histogram of tasks by their final effort. We also show the final effort for each completed task, ordered from largest to smallest.

To see for any workstream:

If you're using Socratic's Git integration, you can switch the Activity view to see code instead of tasks. In this mode, we show you the distribution of code activity by repo:

You can apply further filters to both code and task modes to see the distributions by your chosen filters.

Fixes & enhancements

Fixes & enhancements

Cycle health card for data-driven retrospectives

We've significantly enhanced the view for completed cycles, introducing a new health card for sprint retrospectives.

This health card automatically surfaces:

For each measure, we show how the percent compares to the average from your prior three sprints. Each measure is clickable, and will show the tasks specific to each in the list below.

Accompanying the cycle health card is a second tab called Complex Tasks. This shows the tasks with the largest actual effort that were delivered in the cycle.

Simply choose any completed cycle to see its health card.

Markdown for task descriptions and comments

Both task descriptions and comments can now be formatted with markdown.

We've also added the ability to mention other tasks in a description using forward slash (/). These mentions do not yet automatically link to the mentioned task, but they will!

Fixes & enhancements

Bitbucket integration now available!

Automated workflow, enriched activity data, even more accurate automated estimates—all the goodness of integrating Socratic with source code management is now available for Bitbucket.

A better summarization of code activity by task

Speaking of source code integration... We've modified the depiction of code activity on each task to provide a summary by primary action, with the details below.

Fixes & enhancements

An improved workload balance

Based on customer conversations and our own usage, we've made some changes to Balance to make it more clear and configurable:

You can read more on Balance here.

Direct link to a task

We now support the ability to copy / paste the link to a specific task. From task detail, just click the link icon, or press cmd + . (or ctrl + . in Windows).

Fixes & enhancements

GitHub integration for automated workflow & enhanced intelligence

GitHub integration is now available for Socratic. Connecting GitHub to Socratic gives:

To enable:

Read more about the benefits to GitHub integration here.

Fixes & enhancements

Automatic work forecast

We've enhanced the Health Card's timeline to include an automated forecast of time to deliver. This forecast uses the historical actuals of the workstream and people engaged to calculate a probable delivery date range for the selected body of work.

Note that previously, the timeline was shown only for cycles, and any workstream with a due date. Now, all workstreams will include a timeline and forecast. Views do not yet include forecast, but they will.

Refining and improving forecast accuracy will be one of the main efforts of our data science.

More choice in assigning effort

Based on feedback, we've expanded from three to four the number of automated effort options that may be assigned to a task:

This offers better precision in cases where there's a sizable time gap between less and average.

Fixes & enhancements

Reorder tasks

Task reordering is now available in Socratic. Simply drag and drop cards into your preferred order. This works in both board and list views, as well as backlog.

Optimized task save

Saving changes to a task is now an explicit action via button (vs. auto-save on close). This should improve the usability of task detail, and eliminate certain cases where viewing tasks simultaneously by different people would result in overwrites.

Fixes & enhancements

Introducing Views: a unified view of health across any body of work

We're happy to announce the official rollout of Views. With Views, you can create a customized look at work across any number of teams or projects—along with an instant, real-time view into health and progress. All in just a few clicks!

Fixes & enhancements

A better view for stand-ups

The People view takes the work of the board and reframes it through the lens of the people doing the work. For this view, we've enhanced the way we show task activity over the last 24 hours.

Previously, we captured only the most recent action from the last 24 hours. Now, we summarize a count of all changes from the last 24 hours for each task, and show the detail on hover.

Among other things, this enhancement should help make the People view even stronger as your one-stop shop for running stand-up meetings.

Fixes & enhancements

Data-driven sprint retrospectives

For teams using cycles (a.k.a. sprints), we now provide a snapshot of cycle accomplishments to help in retrospectives.

You can see this snapshot for any completed cycle by selecting the completed cycle in the navigation. The snapshot shows:

As always, we're keen to use data to answer questions that otherwise require manual digging and discussion. If there are other things you'd like to see for retrospectives, let us know!

Fixes & enhancements

A faster way to enter multiple tasks

It's now faster to add tasks to your boards: the enter key will commit the active task, and open a new card for the next. When finished creating tasks, just press the esc key. This works for any phase, including backlog.

Customize your name

You can personalize your avatar, and now you can customize your name. Simply go to your personal view, click on your name, enter your new identity, and press enter.

Fixes & enhancements

Personalized avatars

You can now create avatars in your own image. To change your avatar:

Expanded docs (v1)

We've published a complete set of initial doc, covering not only the Health Card components but also general app usage, as well as a "How to..." section. More to come, including integration into the app (of course).

Fixes & enhancements

Multi-file (and type) attachments

In addition to being able to add screenshots directly to a task's description (via copy or drag-and-drop), we now support longer form attachments across all major file types. Just choose the Attachments tab on task detail.

Docs

We've published our first set of product doc, describing the Health Card components:

More to come, including a "How to..." section for suggested practices.

Fixes & enhancements