466: Change Ship It to something clearer
- WontFix
- Review Board
| her****@gmai***** (Google Code) (Is this you? Claim this profile.) | |
| Nov. 10, 2010 |
reviewboard is great once one figures out how it works. There were a few things that confused people in our company. One of them was "Ship It". Some people were worried that this might actually commit code. And no one knew what this was really intended to do. A different name might make it clearer. Maybe: approved or certified? Herc
Meant to log this as an enhancement, but not sure how to do that. Sorry about that.
Google Code unfortunately only allows us to mark bugs as enhancements. We're hoping they change that... I can see the misunderstanding about "Ship It." However I'm not sure we're going to change that in the near future. A lot of people are used to it as it is. Perhaps we should do a better job of informing the users that we never write to the repository. We could also do something with inline help of sorts. Either a label alongside the Ship It checkbox or a tooltip on mouse over informing the user of what this does.
-
- Type-Defect + Type-Enhancement + Usability + Component-Reviews
I have to say I agree with the original poster. The first time I used Review Board, I didn't understand what the "Ship it!" checkbox would actually do. Being an imperative phrase, it seems more like I'm telling Review Board to commit the change rather than saying to the original poster "Yes, you can 'ship it'". Also, "Ship it" seems like a fairly US-centric term. I don't know about other countries, but certainly in the UK it sounds a bit out of place. "Approved" or "Change approved" seems pretty unambiguous in all of these respects. Or "Approve these changes" for the reviewer's checkbox, and "Approved" when subsequently viewing the request? I don't know that people being used to the phrase "Ship it" is a brilliant argument in beta software, but if it must stay maybe it could become a config option? Though perhaps that's not worth it given the minimal times it appears in the source code. Either way, yes, more contextual help around the option in the UI would be a plus.
It is problematic and -- believe me or not -- in my experience, one of the learning curve step to anyone using ReviewBoard for the first time (me included). I am trying to get people to use this tool within the company. Well, to *everybody* (no exceptions!) I had to explicitly explain what that "Ship It checkbox" is for. Either they had no clue or weren't sure what it did. I guess this was a nice & cool thing for a home-grown software for a specific "culture", but for a broader usage (as in "the company next door!") something has to be done to stop having to explain it to people. You even have a "FAQ" about it. Maybe I should order green T-Shirts with the word "Ship It!" in the front and "Review Board User" in the back? Like it is a brand-thing. ..But we can all learn it of course. This is just a usability quirk. I think one of the goal to Review Board is its usability and slickness -- so in the name of that, I would do something here. (have you looked at codestrikker?) If you really want to keep it (because of "branding consideration") then add some explanation text everywhere it appears. Else, either change it OR have a configuration option to change it.
There are a lot of requests for changing the name, adding a "reject" or "defect" option, and adding customIzable defect types. We'll need to think about all the requests and come up with a model that makes sense. I don't have an ETA on this.
After discussing this for more than two years, I think we've decided that we're not going to change it.
-
+ WontFix