Minglepublic

Feature Requests

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Post

    Mike DeCleene
    Make it hard for Admins to bypass transitions
    Post posted March 3, 2010 by Mike DeCleene
    495 Views, 1 Comment
    Topic:
    Make it hard for Admins to bypass transitions
    Body:

    One major weakness of Mingle (IMO) is that it doesn't understand history natively, so if I want to track "when was this card analysis complete?," "when was this card development complete?" etc, I have to set up a bunch of hidden fields, make sure Status is "transition only," and set up a bunch of transitions to capture the right metadata. 

    The "hidden fields + transitions" approach works pretty well, but has a major hole that keeps biting me--project admins aren't actually blocked by "transition only" restrictions. 

    I find myself almost once an iteration looking at my MQL-generated charts, seeing something odd (e.g. more stories are dev complete than analysis complete), and having to find the card and fix the metadata.  Invariably, someone with project admin privileges forgot to use the transition, and just walked the story status forward by hand.  Which means my hidden fields didn't get set. 

    Mingle makes this kind of bug easy, because someone with "Project Admin" is always active with admin priviliges, and so is never bound by restrictions like "transition only." This feels wrong to me.

    I realize I could bypass this by "locking down" project admin to only a very small number of users, but that seems like a heavy handed fix.  What I'd prefer is for admins to be warned in some way "Hey, you're doing something that I am only allowing you to do because you're an admin."  This would be a useful reminder to admins "Oh, yeah--there's a better/different way to do this." 

    Comment

    • Suzie Prince
      posted March 3, 2010 by Suzie Prince

      Hi Mike

      Thanks for your detailed post.

      I guess there are a couple of things to address here; 1. historical reporting and 2. preventing admins acting outside of the project workflow.

      With regard to 1. we have strong intentions to address this as we understand the need for people to use historical data. To speak to 2. we also recognise that this is an issue, in this case, but also in other scenarios and have stories in our backlog to address this. I have updated our stories with your scenario and request.

      Thanks again

      - Suzie