ActiveCollab – Dress to Impress

Joel Avery, cofounder and CTO at FashionPass, wrote a customer story
FashionPass allows you to rent and swap designer clothes and accessories as often as you like. We believe that great clothes can transform your appearance and how you feel. You can achieve anything if you feel good. We have a mission to give women the closet they desire so that they can get the job, do the moves and steal the show. We are simply in the business making women feel unstoppable. We have two main departments: marketing and development. ActiveCollab has been a lifesaver for the former. ActiveCollab is used primarily for three main development projects. These include our customer-facing website as well as two separate inventory management systems. The software allows us to assign developers, managers, QAs, and QAs to tasks, keep track images, comments, search through it all, and even keep track of them all. We can also prioritize tasks. This is why our web development team thrives on ActiveCollab.
It works like this: First, we assign each developer their task list. The Scrum Master assigns each developer a task list. He then distributes them to the developers. Each developer is represented by their name. Then in parenthesis, it shows the stage number from which they work. They start working on it and then change it to in progress. You can follow our process using the flowchart below.
Our customer-facing website is the main project. It’s simple: I create the tasks, then I assign them to the Scrum Master. He then assigns them one of his team members. I prioritize tasks for them by dragging them up and down. They can click on their name/task list to bring up all the tasks that they are involved in. Prioritizing is an important skill for us. It is amazing to be able to go back and find things from the past. Many times, a task is marked as completed and then later you discover that it needed to be changed. You may just want to know how it worked or see the discussion on the task. It’s all there, searchable, and it’s a lifesaver. Before ActiveCollab, we used Google Docs. Each developer had a long document that contained all of their tasks. Developers would highlight a task and then I would archive it in another document. ActiveCollab provided me with the exact same setup, but organized and searchable. I also work from Los Angeles, while the rest of our development team is located overseas. Our warehouse, products and corporate team all reside in LA. ActiveCollab makes it feel like my remote colleagues can be right next to me. We strive for progress, but now we can actually enjoy it
ActiveCollab would not have allowed me to scale my business. Without ActiveCollab, I’m unable to manage development projects. ActiveCollab makes development progress 75% faster and bugs can be found and fixed much quicker. AC is a clear choice for us.