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• Bill Armstrong

  Posted on Oct 28, 2009 (permalink)

  Hi,
  
  I did a demo of your product to my team. It was generally well received, but there were a few comments that I wanted to pass along:
  
  1. The team did not like the colours. A theme feature would be appreciated.
  2. The team did not like the fact that the taskboard does not show all of the work items for the sprint in the same view. I know from your demo videos that the task board used to show all of the Product Backlog Items and Sprint Backlog Items together in one view. I read from another post that you removed this for performance reasons. We are currently using the Scrum for Team System taskboard which does show the entire taskboard. I agree that generating the complete view does take quite a bit of time (our TFS server is in the UK and we are in Canada), but some members of the team felt that the benefit of seeing the whole picture in one view was worth the wait. Would it be possible to bring that feature back and make it configurable? Allow users to select how they want to work with the taskboard.
  3. One feature that we are sorely missing in our current taskboard is the ability to customize the colours of the cards based on an attribute of the work item. For example, if we have different processes for processing bugs depending on whether the bug will be fixed in the sprint or if it will be deferred. If it will be fixed in the sprint we do not actually log it as a Bug. We log it as a Sprint Backlog Item and simply prefix the title with [Bug]. It would be nice if we could configure the taskboard to show these Sprint Backlog items in Red. I know our tech writer would love it if we could show her items in a different colour. Test items could also be in a different colour. You get the idea.
  
  Thank you.

  Reply

• Ryan Moore

  Posted on Oct 29, 2009 (permalink)

  Hi Bill,
  
  1. At this time we don't have any plans to provide alternate themes or colour schemes.  We have had several requests for this, so we may consider adding it in a future release. Unfortunately, there are many other features we would like to add, and this one is low on the list.
  
  2. Your suggestion to have this as an option is a good one. I have added this request to our backlog and we will consider it for future releases. I know that this is a feature that we want to add, it is just a question of how we can do it best.
  
  3. Currently we have a feature request in our backlog for allowing users to customize the work item colours based on Type, and this is something we are considering for future releases. However, it appears you are looking for something a little more specific. Assigning colours based on a title prefix is more complicated than we were planning. I have added this suggestion to our backlog and it may be addressed for future releases.
  
  If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.
  
  Thanks,
  Ryan
  

  Reply


• Bill Armstrong

  Posted on Oct 29, 2009 (permalink)

  Hi Ryan,
  
  Thanks for your reply.
  
  I'm not specifically looking to be able to customize the colour based on a prefix in the title. Other mechanisms such as adding a new field to the Sprint Backlog Item work item could be used instead. I'm not really an expert in the inner workings of TFS, so I'll leave it up to you guys to figure out the best mechanism. I'm just looking for a way to group Sprint Backlog Items into various categories that I can assign colours to.
  
  I'm not sure that basing the colour on the work item type would work well with the Conchango Scrum template. In order to use the other tools that are geared toward the Scrum template you are pretty much restricted to using the Sprint Backlog Item work item type within the sprint itself. I could be wrong about that though.

  Reply

• Ryan Moore

  Posted on Nov 4, 2009 (permalink)

  Hey again Bill,
  
  I agree with you. When I mentioned custom colours I was referring to a user ability to change the default colours and add colours for custom work item types. For example, they would be able to make Bugs blue instead of red. And currently all custom work item types are coloured the same (Grayish White).
  
  I have added your notes about adding custom colours to the same work item type (regardless of method) to a feature request to our backlog.
  
  Thanks for the feedback,
  Ryan
  

  Reply

• Ryan Moore

  Posted on Nov 4, 2009 (permalink)

  Hey again Bill,
  
  I agree with you. When I mentioned custom colours I was referring to a user ability to change the default colours and add colours for custom work item types. For example, they would be able to make Bugs blue instead of red. And currently all custom work item types are coloured the same (Grayish White).
  
  I have added your notes about adding custom colours to the same work item type (regardless of method) to a feature request in our backlog.
  
  Thanks for the feedback,
  Ryan
  

  Reply

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