[Nicolas Noullet]

Hi John,

You are correct, “Rank” means the position of the story in the default sorting order. This order represents the priorities according to the Product Owner.

Actually, the rank is implemented as a property of individual stories that you can find in exports, API etc. However, what really matters in the user interface is the resulting list. The rank of an individual story has little value on their own. That is why it is not displayed in the story details panel.

Changing the rank on an individual story without the context of the whole list would also have little value, as a Product Owner usually needs to position it relative to other stories. That is why the only way you can change it from a story details is to use the “Move to top priority” menu, which does not require additional context. Otherwise, you can change it by reordering stories by drag and drop in the list itself (only the Product Owner can do that).

It is offered as an explicit sorting criteria so that the default sorting criteria is shown and so that you can go back to it if you changed it temporarily. It is not called “Position” because when the sorting order is different, e.g. “Business Value”, then the actual visual position of the story changes and it not equal to its “Rank” anymore.

Does it make sense?

[Nicolas Noullet]

Hi,

Thanks for your feedback.

For the moment the clues do not point in the same direction, so it’s hard to guess.

What we learned: it seems to be related to your computer, but probably not your iceScrum account, cookies or browsers or IP address. That is strange, so this should be confirmed if it happens again. Also, it disappears when restarting iceScrum.

Anyway I am glad that it works again! Feel free to come back if it happens again.

Kind regards

Nicolas

[Nicolas Noullet]

Hi,

Thanks for your detailed report.

A way to trouble shoot this would consist in trying to isolate the problem.

If several browsers are affected then this looks like a network issue. You may first check the browser console and see what is the status of the HTTP response you get. There may be an explanation in the HTTP headers as well.

You may also use the command line to access iceScrum e.g.
wget http://<ip>:8080/icescrum

If it still doesn’t work, then you may then try from another network connection, e.g. ethernet if you were using the Wi-Fi (and vice-versa). This will change your IP address as well as the network devices between you and iceScrum so the outcome may change.

You may also switch from ethernet to another ethernet cable or from Wi-FI to another Wi-Fi hotspot but there are less chances of success.

If your iceScrum server is accessible from the Internet then switching to another Internet connexion would also be very interesting.

[Nicolas Noullet]

Hi Josep,

We do not manage to reproduce your issue. It seems that one field in the form is invalid, however no validation error is displayed. In order to know what happens exactly, can you open the javascript console and type:
$(‘.ng-invalid’)

Then expand the resulting list, and take a screenshot of the full console?

This will tell us what kind of validation error there is.

By the way if you just want to try iceScrum then you can register online and try it for free on our hosted Cloud platform.

[Nicolas Noullet]

Dear John,

There is no way to retroactively change the name of all instances of an actor in existing stories.

While it may seem like an obvious bug at first, it is actually a bit more subtle than that.

Indeed, the actor name is part of the story statement, which is often critical and carefully crafted by a human. Having a hard link so that the actor name change is automatically reflected everywhere is too radical. Indeed, when renaming an actor, you may just want upcoming stories to be affected by the change and not the one belonging to past sprints. Changing past stories indiscriminately could break the trust you have than when you write something, it stays as you wrote it unless you actively want to change it. That is why we decided to loosely couple the actor name so the hard link is made only on the ID.

In this case, automatic renaming should be provided as an option. However, a consequence of the loose link is that it that such automation is harder to implement, so with an agile mindset we decided to start without it and see if the need would arise. Until now we received very little feedback as the need to rename actors seldom occur and when it occurs, it is mainly at the very beginning of a project where changing the name manually on each story is quite inexpensive.

Anyway, your feedback is valuable for us and if we notice more interest for automatic renaming then we may implement it.

[Nicolas Noullet]

Hi John,

In addition to what you found, in iceScrum 7 you can filter the whole application with a specific actor by typing its name in the search bar and clicking in the autocompleted result. You can also click on the number of stories displayed in the actor settings in order to get the same result.

We call such persisted filter “Context”, and it can also be applied by tag or feature.

[Nicolas Noullet]

John,

Thanks for your quick answer!

The reason is that rich text may be easily “abused” in this field by using bold, italic, bullet points, hyperlinks, embedded images… So maybe rather than custom formatting, what the description would need is an automatic emphasize of the template? It is not easy to implement but as you suggest it would probably improve readability!

[Nicolas Noullet]

Dear John,

There is indeed a Microsoft Teams integration with iceScrum!

What is “Coming soon…” is just the documentation. Actually we wrote it when releasing the App but we lost it because of a bug in our documentation editor. We have to write it again…

The integration does not allow to comment on stories / tasks from Teams. The call to action you found in the “Comments” section lists Apps that provide online meetings. When you click on it it opens the App catalog filtered with the term “Collaboration” to promote related Apps that you may also be interested in, that is why you can see the Teams app from there. It is a bit misleading.

Here is what the integration currently does:
– It sends iceScrum story events to Teams, like the Slack integrations does: https://www.icescrum.com/documentation/slack/.
– It allows opening iceScrum views (e.g. backlog or task board) as Teams tabs.

If you are interested in these features, we can help you set up the integration. Do you use Teams in the Cloud or does you company have its own server?

[Nicolas Noullet]

Dear John,

I misunderstood your statement: “…but the rest in German”: I thought that you had part of the application translated in German, which can happen. I now understand that you meant that the acceptance text you write is in German, sorry!

Anyway the “Given When Then” template is part of the translation files and it is not configurable manually. If one day the German translation is back, then the template will be translated as well (for example in French it is “En tant que…”).

Using “story templates” is one way to work around that but you have to create a bunch of “empty” acceptance tests on the sample story. Indeed, “Instance of a sample story” is more accurate but we had to find a shorter name!

The story description does not support rich text because it is intended to be concise, simple and homogeneous
across stories. To provide more details and specific information on stories, we recommend using the “notes” field that is longer (up to 5000 characters) and supports rich text.

[Nicolas Noullet]

Hello,

The reason for this incomplete translation is that there is actually no official support for German anymore as the application changed significantly and the German translation did not keep up with it.

However what was already translated is still available for users who configured the German language in their profile while it was supported, which I guess is your case.

Most of the german translation is part of the open source version of iceScrum and we would be glad to bring it back if community members are willing to update the translation files. If you are interested, please let us know!

[Nicolas Noullet]

You are right! We should rename the option to better reflect the current behavior.

Regarding the benefit you quote, I did not mean a benefit as compared to the former behavior, but I rather meant that in the current version where weekends cannot be removed, there is a benefit of having the ideal line adapting to weekends rather than not.

[Nicolas Noullet]

Hi,

The current behavior can be observed since the release of iceScrum 7.

This is a functional regression due to technical issues. When defining the UI for iceScrum 7, we picked a library to render charts that has one important drawback: it works well only for a linear x axis so it can’t skip days. As a result, weekend days cannot be removed. We made a trade-off as this library offer many other interesting features.

The option “hide weekends” is still there because it is used in other places (availabilities), and we decided to use it to adapt the ideal line as well.

The median / ideal line is here to show the ideal case. If teams are not expected to work the weekends then the line should be flat as no progress is expected to be done. A benefit is that when you see flats in the actual curve and they match the ideal line flats, then they can be safely ignored, while flats in your curve in other places means that there is probably a problem.

There is another way to understand where do these flats come from, with a little imagination. Imagine the former behavior with the option enabled, then “cut” the diagram where the weekends should be, then “spread” the diagram to insert the weekends without touching the diagram, and you will see the flats appear.

[Nicolas Noullet]

Hi Bruno,

First, to avoid any confusion, please note that in an agile context, “value” usually means “business value”, which is the outcome of the project = how valuable your product is for end users, stakeholders, customers etc.

Here it rather seems that you want to evaluate the cost of a sprint. The team is expected to be quite stable so the global cost of a sprint can be approximated from the team composition and the duration of a sprint.

In order to be more precise and account for variations within a sprint, you may record individual time spent on a sprint by each team member on a daily basis through a feature called “Team capacity”. As you may have noticed, iceScrum behavior can be extended through Apps. This feature is provided as an App: https://www.icescrum.com/documentation/availabilities/. It allows taking into account variation of team size, holidays, sick leaves, part time, etc., to calculate the time spent on the project both individually and for the whole team. The time spent is entered manually, it is not consolidated from task data.

Regarding data recorded on tasks, by default only the remaining time is recorded, which does not allow to know the actual time spent (e.g. you may think that 8 hours of work remain on task, then work 2 hours on it only to find that only 1 additional hour of work is required).

However, you can use an App to enter the time spent on tasks in a dedicated field: https://www.icescrum.com/documentation/time-tracking/. It is not consolidated in iceScrum but you can use the REST API to collect this data and externally sum the time spent for each deliverable. Here is the documentation of the API : https://www.icescrum.com/documentation/rest-api/. The corresponding task field is named “spent”.

[Nicolas Noullet]

Thomas,

You are right, this is a limitation of the solution I suggested. If you need a stable URL then the best option is to use an external hosting provider.

[Nicolas Noullet]

Hi Thomas,

I am not sure that I understand your question, what do you mean by “by name”?

Anyway, if that is what you want, it is possible to insert an image in any rich text field. However, please note that this is done by providing an URL to an image that is already hosted. To do so, click on the “picture” icon in the rich text toolbar and provide the URL and an alternate text describing it.

The release vision is a rich text field, so it will work there.

If your image is not available online, you can first attach it to the release, then preview it, right click to copy the image URL, and then use it in the vision as described above.

Does this help?

[Author]

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