Chandler has been an experimentally usable calendar since our 0.5 release. In the last 2 releases, it has been enhanced, polished and fine-tuned to the extent that the Calendar application in Chandler is absolutely usable now for day-to-day scheduling needs. With a fervent attempt to “eat our own dogfood”, we initiated the effort of using Chandler to maintain a shared QA calendar within team on Hub. The work flows spanned across features, going beyond just using the calendar application. Here are some of the heavily used work flows:

1. Scheduling meetings: Our QA staff meetings, IRC QA sessions, Bug Councils, 1-1s, and some special one-off meetings were all scheduled on the shared QA calendar on Hub. Some of the meetings were scheduled through the Hub web UI as well. The frequency of the meetings spanned from weekly, biweekly and monthly.

2. Sending meeting agendas: I would add the agenda for the upcoming QA staff meeting in the notes section, stamp it as mail and send it out to the team. We now have the affordance of updating only a single instance of a series and emailing it.

3. Updating shared events: Occasionally team members would update the agenda for the staff meeting by adding additional items and hitting Update. This would automatically bring the newly updated items into the NOW section of the Dashboard for immediate perusal. Also if the item was stamped as mail, a mail copy would be sent to the people in the address fields.

4. Adding to the task list: Outstanding action items for the team were added as tasks in the shared calendar. Tasks were often stamped as mail and sent to team members.

5. Triaging items in the Dashboard: We heavily used the Dashboard for triaging tasks and events within the team. When certain tasks were done, team members would mark it DONE and everyone would see its status in their own Chandler Dashboard. It would again, automatically pop into the NOW section of their Dashboard for grabbing immediate attention.

6. Using the ticketed view of the calendar: Team members, when traveling or working remotely would use the ticketed view of the calendar for updating events from the web UI.

All-in-all it was a very positive experience. We uncovered bugs that would have purely surfaced in day-to-day usage of the app. It helped bring some usability issues back on the design lists and more importantly helped us collaborate efficiently within the QA team.