Enhancement Request: tagging, feeds, when-updated indicators

Tuesday, February 10, 2015
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Please add functionality for following artifacts, @-sign tagging and mentions, and user feeds.  Aka what some people refer to as "social" functionality.

Obviously, this is a big thing to request.  But it would be awesomely helpful to users!  Our users -- especially our casual users, which are the biggest group -- have a very challenging time trying to keep track of what's going on in SpiraTeam.  Social functionality and a feed would help them.  I just can't emphasize that enough.  However, it would have to be a feed that can be tuned, so that users can decide what kind and degree of updates they want in their feed.  Otherwise, it will become like the email notifications.  Our users have tuned them out because they're unmanageable when a lot of edits are occurring, especially minor edits.

Incidentally, a parallel and perhaps more valuable capability would be visual indicators of how recently an artifact was changed, or how recently an artifact's children were changed, or how recently an associated artifact was changed.  Color-coded indicators, perhaps.  Such indicators will give users an alternative to a feed and to a barrage of notification emails.  The indicators would allow them to log in and check at any time to see if any of the items they care about have been updated recently.  This will especially help when the updates are due to furious editing and revising.  Users don't usually care if an artifact was revised 50 times in a week.  They just care that it was changed since the last time they examined it.

Now, back to tagging & feeds:   Tagging/mentions could used as a shortcut to cross-reference artifacts and users.  Also to insert stuff into related artifacts' comments feed.  Here are a few use cases to illustrate what I mean by that.

1.  A user is commenting on an incident.  The user tags/mentions another user.  As a result, that user's comments feed now contains an entry with the incident's high-level fields plus the comment itself.  (A prerequisite for this is to add comments feeds to users.  To keep things simpler regarding security and visibility, it could just be a private "mentions" feed, and each user would only be able to see their own "mentions" feed.)

2.  A user is commenting on an incident.  The user tags/mentions a requirement.  As a result, that requirement's comments feed now contains an entry with the incident's high-level fields plus the comment itself.  Also, an association is created between the requirement and the incident (for their respective "association" tabs) if that association did not already exist.)

1 Replies
Friday, February 13, 2015
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inflectra.sarahx
re: jfreed Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Hi Jon

Thanks for the very cool request. We already have an open enhancement for a project newsfeed and potentially a customized user newsfeed. We also have the social @tagging type of feature requested, but none of the features together so I have logged this as a new request, linked to the two other ones I mentioned.

Regards
Sarah

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  • Started: Tuesday, February 10, 2015
  • Last Reply: Friday, February 13, 2015
  • Replies: 1
  • Views: 6624