We have some problems / doubts with TeamPulse comments that I would like to discuss about.
The use of comments we do is: Any team member (The project manager, other business analyst, tester or developer) reviews the requirements and he sends comments to the businesss analyst that wrote the story, to ask for changes or doubts.
But we are not very happy with the TeamPulse comments functionality for this. Some reasons (some of them are already reported) are:
•The comments stay “there forever”. When a comment is solved, usually we don’t need it anymore, or at least we don’t need to have it always visible unless we are looking for this in particular.
•The comments are ordered from oldest to newest, so we have to scroll down to the end to see the latest ones.
•When you are reviewing comments, sometimes you look for lots of things and all the relationships and links while you write the comment, but if you navigate to another part of teampulse you lose the comment with no warning.
•You can’t correct a mistake at a comment or delete a comment if you change your mind after sending it.
Examples:
◦ Spelling mistakes.
◦ You send a comment “I can’t see where ‘term’ is defined” and then you find it, and have to send a new comment “Never mind the previous comment”, but the author will lose time reading them…
•The story author don’t have any automatic way to know when somebody comments on their stories.
•There is no way that the author can know at TP if he already saw a comment if he hasn't replied (If you have lots of pending comments and start reading them it's complicated to know where to continue if you have to stop and do another thing, or if you want to let something for later).
•There is no way for the sender to know if the author saw the comment if the author hasn't replied.
•I think the activity stream don’t really solve any of this problems, if someone reviews 20 stories and writes 15 comments it’s more a mess to try to read the comments or the answers at the activity stream.
•The replies to comments should appear next to the comment you replied, (hierarchically "under it"). I don’t think the “reply option” really solves the problem, neither at the activity stream or comments into the story form is clear that a comment is the reply to another one.
I think that maybe, we have got it wrong, and the comments aren’t supposed to be used this way, but, if they aren’t, how can we solve our problem? Doesn't other teams make that kind of stories reviews?
5 Answers, 1 is accepted
Thank you for your feedback, it is very much appreciated. We are currently increasing our HTML footprint and the commenting system will be a part of that, so this is a great time to give us your feedback.
I will touch on each point individually below, but first I would just like to mention that for many of your comments I have indicated that I recommend you create a feature request on our public Feedback Portal. I understand that individually adding these items is a fair chunk of work that you may feel you have already done as you have already taken the time to send us this well-thought-out list. If you want I will create these items for you and send you links to them, but I feel that items that are actually created by the customers tend to catch our Product Owner's eye better than ones that we create for them. It also provides the benefit that you will automatically be marked to follow the items and as such will see when they are commented on, which can often lead to interesting dialogue that helps us to further enhance the product.
So with the above in mind, please let me know if you want me to handle the entry of the items that I indicate as being great feature request entries below.
What follows are your comments followed by my responses, in order:
[Raquel] The use of comments we do is: Any team member (The project manager, other business analyst, tester or developer) reviews the requirements and he sends comments to the business analyst that wrote the story, to ask for changes or doubts.
[Dave] I believe this is a great use of the comments and is an essential workflow we want to support. The system can ideally replace the use of email for this sort of dialogue and provide a place for all of the discussion to stay within the context of the story.
[Raquel] The comments stay “there forever”. When a comment is solved, usually we don’t need it anymore, or at least we don’t need to have it always visible unless we are looking for this in particular.
[Dave] This is a feature that I do not believe has been requested before. I agree that in the context of how comments are displayed (oldest to newest) this could be a useful feature on a story with many comments. I suggest you create a feature request on our Feedback Portal in regards to this as it will draw the attention of our Product Owner.
[Raquel] The comments are ordered from oldest to newest, so we have to scroll down to the end to see the latest ones.
[Dave] I completely agree that this is a bit of a pain in the current layout. This may change when the layouts are re-designed for HTML, but I recommend adding a request to the Feedback Portal anyways just to make sure it is taken into consideration.
[Raquel] When you are reviewing comments, sometimes you look for lots of things and all the relationships and links while you write the comment, but if you navigate to another part of TeamPulse you lose the comment with no warning.
[Dave] Hopefully the HTML implementation will alleviate this issue a bit. By virtue of being a standard web site all links will be right-clickable and allow you to view in another window. So in a case such as you describe you could open each linked item in a separate tab from the one you are authoring your comment in.
[Raquel] You can’t correct a mistake at a comment or delete a comment if you change your mind after sending it.
[Dave] Editing comments was discussed when we first implemented the commenting features, with some team members pro-editing and others opposed. Another feature request to the portal may help to sway votes onto the pro-editing side for future releases :)
[Raquel] The story author don’t have any automatic way to know when somebody comments on their stories.
[Dave] Unfortunately we do not currently have a direct equivalent notification rule to the concept of 'Someone comments on an item I authored', although there are other ways to get a similar result. One would be to use the "Notify me when others change this item" feature found on the story property pane, however this will lead to far more than just notifications regarding comments. Another option may be to make use of the "Someone comments on an item I've commented on" notification by adding a quick comment when authoring a story (although this only serves to muddy the comments up even more, which is obviously not ideal). Having team members make liberal use of the mention feature ("Someone mentions me in a comment" rule) is another way to get notified of comments but unfortunately relies on the commenter to be thorough in whom and when they use the mention. More info on the mention feature as well as the newer notification abilities can be found here: http://www.telerik.com/agile-project-management-tools/whats-new/r4-2012.aspx
[Raquel] There is no way that the author can know at TP if he already saw a comment if he hasn't replied (If you have lots of pending comments and start reading them it's complicated to know where to continue if you have to stop and do another thing, or if you want to let something for later).
[Dave] We have discussed the ability to mark comments as read/unread in the past. We did implement this feature to a degree with activities, which is how you can see a notification icon of how many unread items you have when the stream is unpinned, however even there we do not yet provide a method to manually toggle the status on an item-by-item basis (once you view the stream we mark all the items as read). I think you should also create a feature request on the portal for this item.
[Raquel] There is no way for the sender to know if the author saw the comment if the author hasn't replied.
[Dave] We discussed read-receipt functionality during development of the activity stream but felt that as many users actively oppose such functionality as would want it. If you create a feature request for this item I will be very interested to watch how the voting plays out to see what our user base thinks.
[Raquel] I think the activity stream don’t really solve any of this problems, if someone reviews 20 stories and writes 15 comments it’s more a mess to try to read the comments or the answers at the activity stream.
[Dave] You're right, the stream would not be a great way to consume this kind of mass change to multiple stories as it is more intended for dealing with things as they happen in smaller chunks.
[Raquel] The replies to comments should appear next to the comment you replied, (hierarchically "under it"). I don’t think the “reply option” really solves the problem, neither at the activity stream or comments into the story form is clear that a comment is the reply to another one.
[Dave] We agree that a reply hierarchy (at least to one level such as Facebook) is necessary, and this feature is in our backlog. I cannot promise when it may be implemented but we all agree on it being a beneficial feature.
Thank you again for taking the time to write this excellent feedback and I hope that we can work towards making the commenting and activity systems support your workflow in an improved fashion going forwards.
David Harris
the Telerik team
Visit our Ideas & Feedback portal to submit a feature request, vote on existing requests or submit general feedback.
Rank 1
Don't worry, I will handle the requests by myself when I have some time. As I said, I already asked for some of them, but wanted to put it together because we had some internal discussions about comments use and utility, and wanted some other opinions.
We look forward to seeing your requests and comments in the feedback portal and thank you again for taking the time to share them with us.
Regards,David Harris
the Telerik team
Visit our Ideas & Feedback portal to submit a feature request, vote on existing requests or submit general feedback.
Rank 1
[Raquel] The use of comments we do is: Any team member (The project manager, other business analyst, tester or developer) reviews the requirements and he sends comments to the business analyst that wrote the story, to ask for changes or doubts.
[Dave] I believe this is a great use of the comments and is an essential workflow we want to support. The system can ideally replace the use of email for this sort of dialogue and provide a place for all of the discussion to stay within the context of the story.
Is very interesting that the system supports this, because:
- Mails can get lost, for example our email configuration failed 3 times and we lost some emails till we noticed it wasn’t working.
- Is better and faster to work with only one tool.
While all of this gets improved, I would love to hear how other people solve this problem now, so we can get some ideas.
[Raquel] The comments stay “there forever”. When a comment is solved, usually we don’t need it anymore, or at least we don’t need to have it always visible unless we are looking for this in particular.
[Dave] This is a feature that I do not believe has been requested before. I agree that in the context of how comments are displayed (oldest to newest) this could be a useful feature on a story with many comments. I suggest you create a feature request on our Feedback Portal in regards to this as it will draw the attention of our Product Owner.
[Raquel] The comments are ordered from oldest to newest, so we have to scroll down to the end to see the latest ones.
[Dave] I completely agree that this is a bit of a pain in the current layout. This may change when the layouts are re-designed for HTML, but I recommend adding a request to the Feedback Portal anyways just to make sure it is taken into consideration.
- Same feedback item than the previous point.
[Raquel] When you are reviewing comments, sometimes you look for lots of things and all the relationships and links while you write the comment, but if you navigate to another part of TeamPulse you lose the comment with no warning.
[Dave] Hopefully the HTML implementation will alleviate this issue a bit. By virtue of being a standard web site all links will be right-clickable and allow you to view in another window. So in a case such as you describe you could open each linked item in a separate tab from the one you are authoring your comment in.
- I think that would be great. The “open at a new window or TAB” functionality is one of the things I miss the most at Silverlight.
[Raquel] You can’t correct a mistake at a comment or delete a comment if you change your mind after sending it.
[Dave] Editing comments was discussed when we first implemented the commenting features, with some team members pro-editing and others opposed. Another feature request to the portal may help to sway votes onto the pro-editing side for future releases :)
[Raquel] The story author don’t have any automatic way to know when somebody comments on their stories.
[Dave] Unfortunately we do not currently have a direct equivalent notification rule to the concept of 'Someone comments on an item I authored', although there are other ways to get a similar result. One would be to use the "Notify me when others change this item" feature found on the story property pane, however this will lead to far more than just notifications regarding comments. Another option may be to make use of the "Someone comments on an item I've commented on" notification by adding a quick comment when authoring a story (although this only serves to muddy the comments up even more, which is obviously not ideal). Having team members make liberal use of the mention feature ("Someone mentions me in a comment" rule) is another way to get notified of comments but unfortunately relies on the commenter to be thorough in whom and when they use the mention. More info on the mention feature as well as the newer notification abilities can be found here: http://www.telerik.com/agile-project-management-tools/whats-new/r4-2012.aspx
- This was already open: http://feedback.telerik.com/Project/8/Feedback/Details/779-comments-on-item-i-created. I think there’s a need for an automatic notification without the need to remember to do something every time I create a story, and also, it would be a pain to have to do something like that to more than 500 stories that we already have. Right now I use the “What’s now” RSS and look for other users changes.
[Raquel] There is no way that the author can know at TP if he already saw a comment if he hasn't replied (If you have lots of pending comments and start reading them it's complicated to know where to continue if you have to stop and do another thing, or if you want to let something for later).
[Dave] We have discussed the ability to mark comments as read/unread in the past. We did implement this feature to a degree with activities, which is how you can see a notification icon of how many unread items you have when the stream is unpinned, however even there we do not yet provide a method to manually toggle the status on an item-by-item basis (once you view the stream we mark all the items as read). I think you should also create a feature request on the portal for this item.
- But you only know a number of unread items… not which of them, neither you can mark the items as you really read them.
[Raquel] There is no way for the sender to know if the author saw the comment if the author hasn't replied.
[Dave] We discussed read-receipt functionality during development of the activity stream but felt that as many users actively oppose such functionality as would want it. If you create a feature request for this item I will be very interested to watch how the voting plays out to see what our user base thinks.
- There is no need to have a separate thing for that if the “read” “unread” for the receiver is developed.
- Idea Created: http://feedback.telerik.com/Project/8/Feedback/Details/884-mark-comments-as-read-unread
[Raquel] I think the activity stream don’t really solve any of this problems, if someone reviews 20 stories and writes 15 comments it’s more a mess to try to read the comments or the answers at the activity stream.
[Dave] You're right, the stream would not be a great way to consume this kind of mass change to multiple stories as it is more intended for dealing with things as they happen in smaller chunks.
- Idea Created: http://feedback.telerik.com/Project/8/Feedback/Details/885-see-all-unread-comments-at-one-place
[Raquel] The replies to comments should appear next to the comment you replied, (hierarchically "under it"). I don’t think the “reply option” really solves the problem, neither at the activity stream or comments into the story form is clear that a comment is the reply to another one.
[Dave] We agree that a reply hierarchy (at least to one level such as Facebook) is necessary, and this feature is in our backlog. I cannot promise when it may be implemented but we all agree on it being a beneficial feature.
- Ok, I found thie already created idea for this: http://feedback.telerik.com/Project/8/Feedback/Details/443-i-want-to-replies-on-selected-comments-instead-of-just-posting-a-regular-comment
We really appreciate your extensive feedback and the time you spent helping us organize the items in our feedback portal. All the items have already been reviewed by our product owner and we hope that their popularity will grow over time.
I have granted you some Telerik points for your continuing collaboration.
Elena Peneva
the Telerik team
Visit our Ideas & Feedback portal to submit a feature request, vote on existing requests or submit general feedback.