Currently, the history list is a list of when a change was made, but not what was changed. To find out what was changed, you have to open each one up.
I would like to see a list of all of the fields that were modified as part of the history line-item, and what the change was (within reason), so I can tell WHO changed the ToDo hours to a higher number without having to drill down one by one.
You could list every change as a separate line, without grouping, but I would rather see the current view with the ability to expand each line item so as to see the changes that make up that line item, with an 'expand all' button. Or maybe have it default to expand all. Or default to having the last X number of days' changes expanded. Or the changes since the last time you viewed the History expanded (like with the Discussions view).
by: John A. | over a year ago | User Interface
Comments
There are quite a few "clunky" things like this in various areas of the VersionOne interface. This product could benefit enormously from the application of some usability engineering techniques. Perhaps they should hire a human factors specialist to help with some if the screens.
The ironic thing about the VersionOne interface is that there are some interface screens that are very well designed and intuitive but there are some others that are real head scratchers.
The problem I see with the history is with the "Change Comment". It should say stuff like "Task created". Sure you can assume the first name on the first entry is who created the task but why not put that information in there. There are other times when the "Change Comment" is blank, like when someone updates the hours remaining. Only way to figure it out is to drill down. You should indicate in the change comment something like, "To Do changed from 3 to 0". If there are multiple changes, then I can see it being more clunky to summarize in the change comment so, maybe in these cases, just indicate something like "Multiple changes" and then you really need to drill down to figure that out. The common actions should be able to be summarized at the top level, however, and that avoids the need to drill down.
In a fast-paced project, this is really critical to managers, team leads, and scrum masters. Currently, we have to remember everything (before and after the change)! Having a full revision history as well as delta reporting as part of the notification system would be very helpful. It would allow us to monitor team changes as well as the chanes stakeholders make when re-prioritizing.
Two comments:
1. How could this take 3 years? I have team members requesting we go back to FogBugz because at least there they could see who changed what and when.
2. If you are not going to fix the history, can we at least make the change comment field mandatroy?
This is critical when conducting a retrospective! How can we know why a story took a certain amount of time, and explain to the team what changed and when? We need this feature please!
Simple list of each state of a User Story, and the date the state changed.
The Activity Stream was introduced to show the log of specific changes made, by whom and when. No need to drill through history to figure out what changed.