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Under review

I would like to be able to collapse stories

Bryan Oakley 12 years ago updated by Matthew O'Riordan (Founder) 12 years ago 3
I want to be able to collapse stories into a single line. Another suggestion in this forum is asking for a name and/or title which would serve this purpose. However, adding a name and/or title adds to the complexity.

Here's what I suggest: allow me to highlight part of the story with simple markup, such as:

    "as a X I want a *graphical test runner* blah blah blah"
    "as a Y I want an *html report* blah blah blah

In the UI, everything between the asterisks becomes bolded, and there's a tool that collapses all my stories so that all I see are the bolded parts, one per line. For example, a collapses view would like like:

theme: improve tools
   graphical test runner
   html report
   syntax checker

Answer

Answer
Under review
Hi Bryan

Thanks for the feedback.

Whilst I like your solution, I think it adds a level of complexity that would require training / explanation for users which we're trying to avoid.

As an alternative, assuming you collapsed a story, and all the criteria and comments were hidden, and the user story part was changed to remove all line breaks and shown in the format "As a XXX, I want to YYY, So I can ZZZ", would that achieve what you are after?

Also, assuming you collapsed a story, would you expect the backlog to remember which stories were collapsed when you return to the backlog, or would it be sufficient that these collapses are remembered only for the session you are in?  The latter way is how theme collapsing currently works.

Matt
Answer
Under review
Hi Bryan

Thanks for the feedback.

Whilst I like your solution, I think it adds a level of complexity that would require training / explanation for users which we're trying to avoid.

As an alternative, assuming you collapsed a story, and all the criteria and comments were hidden, and the user story part was changed to remove all line breaks and shown in the format "As a XXX, I want to YYY, So I can ZZZ", would that achieve what you are after?

Also, assuming you collapsed a story, would you expect the backlog to remember which stories were collapsed when you return to the backlog, or would it be sufficient that these collapses are remembered only for the session you are in?  The latter way is how theme collapsing currently works.

Matt
Would showing the whole story with linebreaks achieve what I was after? No, not really. When we discuss stories in meetings and conversations we always use some verbal shorthand: "the test runner", "support team X", "summary report", etc. That's how the stories live in my head. I don't want to have to read a whole story to know the two or three words that concisely describe what the story is about.

As for the need to collapse, it's because I want to more easily see an overview of my stories. For the release that I'm trying  ezbacklog with I'll have roughly 35 stories or so. With pivotal tracker I can see all 35 stories in a list very easily. With ezbacklog I can only see about a dozen, which makes planning harder.

For me, the bottom line is that ezbacklog is just too verbose. While all the verbiage is critical for the actual cards, for _planning_ I want to be able to see more stories, and only the "meat" of each story rather than all the verbage. That's why I thought that the ability to collapse along with the ability to select two or three words to highlight was an ideal solution.

it's sufficient that the collapsed state is only good for a session. Individual cards don't need to remember if they are collapsed or not.
I think we could certainly introduce a micro-format such as *bold* to highlight the words that are important to you, but it would need to not be required.  Then if collapsed, we could detect if the user has marke certain words as bold, and if they are bold we could darken those words and lighten the others making it easy to visually see what the verbal shorthand would be then.  I assume that would work for you?

I completely understand the need to see a less verbose list of stories, and your suggestion makes sense.  We could possibly also allow a user to collapse all stories in a backlog, so that you can view the list of stories more easily.  Do you think that would be a useful feature?


Yes, I agree this should be totally optional. My preference is that if you use the *markup*, only that shows.If you don't, only the "I want to..." shows. But if you guys always want the whole story but with part bolded, that certainly gets me closer to my goal. Bottom line is, I think it would be very useful to be able to see a list of stories, with each taking up just one line of vertical space so I could see a bunch at one time.