launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Matthew Revell <matthew.revell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 3 February 2012 19:28, Guilherme Salgado
<guilherme.salgado@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> So, we had a chat with Matt earlier this week and while we work on the
> user-testing for the team-based report we'd like to present our plan to
> migrate the work items from the whiteboard to the new table. This is
> roughly how we see this happening:

Thanks for this write-up. I'm not sure if you've already had a call
with Rob, so if not we need to organise that, too.

> 1. Change the blueprint page to have a work-item section,
> inline-editable just like the whiteboard. The data displayed there will
> have the exact same format[1] we use today for work items (note that
> this format is used only on the Web UI; once it's validated we'll parse
> it and create/update the individual work items in the DB). We want to do
> it that way because:
>
>  - it allows people to edit multiple work items at once, using a
>    format they're already familiar with
>  - we don't break any tools that rely on screen-scraping (if there
>    are any still)
>  - it's not any worse than the current user experience (in fact it can
>    be considered significantly better as it will validate users input)
>  - it should be much cheaper than designing a nice UI that is as
>    flexible as editing things in a text area

I'd like to add some context to that last point. For those that don't
know, the work items syntax looks like this:

  Collect the materials of my past busybox integration task: DONE
  Summarise the experience then start to write the presentation: DONE
  Finish the presentation then sent to Bero for review: DONE
  Merge the change from Bero (if any), then freeze to the final
presentation: TODO
  Show the slides on Android Builder Summit: TODO

Basically, it's:
  ARBITRARY TEXT: $STATUS

So, a text box for entering/editing work items makes a lot of sense
for this first step. Also, the text box wouldn't be a jarring change
from how people are already using the makeshift work items system
through blueprint whiteboards.

We can look at something more sophisticated, if that's appropriate,
for a future revision.

-- 
Matthew Revell
Launchpad Product Manager
Canonical

https://launchpad.net/~matthew.revell