http://vaultblog.sourcegear.com/articles/2007/08/30/tag-clouds en-us 40 Upcoming changes to Vault 4.1 and Fortress 1.1 <p>In our work item tracking system, we have over 1800 open items, ranging from bugs to feature requests from our customers. It&#8217;s a nearly impossible task to go through all of them quickly to find the set of bugs which should be fixed in the next release of Vault. We try to alleviate the strain by making sure that bugs have an appropriate priority and category, to help us find the bugs that are important and the bugs that are near the code we&#8217;re fixing anyway. The problem with category and priority is that they are too rigid to be truly helpful. Only administrators can create new priorities and new categories. That&#8217;s why we&#8217;re adding a tagging mechanism to Fortress 1.1, so that all users can help organize the bug database. So that we&#8217;re all on the same page, Wikipedia defines a <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_%28metadata%29>tag</a> as a keyword associated with a piece of information. In our use, the piece of information is a work item. If you want to skip right to your chance to play with a mockup that we&#8217;ve done, go <a href="http://mockups.sourcegear.com/TagCloudMockup/Query.aspx">here</a>.</p> <h2> An overview of tags </h2> <p>The big picture view of tags in Fortress is that a list of keywords can be associated with a bug. If you have a bug with the description &#8220;Client throws exception on startup when using Microsoft .Net Framework v3.0 on Vista&#8221;, a reasonable set of tags to apply would be &#8220;Crash .Net30 Vista&#8221;.</p> <h2> Problems with Priority </h2> <p>The problem with priority is that it doesn&#8217;t tell you why the bug got its priority. Internally, we&#8217;ve developed a list of common tags that imply a priority. For example, any of the tags DataCorruption FirstImpression and BrokenBeyondRepair imply that the bug should be prioritized with the highest priority. Similarly, the tags PhaseOfTheMoon and Grammar imply that the bug should be given the lowest priority, since they don&#8217;t impact the product significantly.</p> <p>I mentioned the Grammar tag specifically, because it is a case where the priority is low for the right reason, but we still want to easily find all of these Grammar bugs in the database, so that they can be fixed. Another reason that Grammar is interesting is that a Grammar bug can happen in any aspect of the product, so this tag will be applied across many different categories.</p> <h2>Tag Clouds </h2> <p>The common thing to do with tags, once you&#8217;ve applied them to all of your bugs, would be to view a Tag Cloud for your open bugs. Once again, turning to Wikipedia, the definition of a <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud>tag cloud</a> is a visual depiction of a group of tags, which are ordered alphabetically, but more frequent tags are represented as larger than others. </p> <p>Here&#8217;s what an example tag cloud might look like:</p> <p><img src=/files/tagcloud12.png></p> <p>You can see that the Performance tag appears largest, because it is the most frequently applied tag.</p> <h2> Extending Tag Clouds </h2> <p>One way in which we&#8217;re going above and beyond the usual Tag Cloud implementation is that we&#8217;re adding the ability to see a tag cloud for query results. This means that when you search for your open bugs for the current milestone, you can see a tag cloud that represents only the bugs returned in the query. This is a huge benefit when you&#8217;re trying to find bugs in your system.</p> <p>The second way that we&#8217;re extending tag clouds is the ability to see a cloud of the other attributes on a bug. For example, an assignee cloud might look like this:</p> <p><img src=/files/assigneeCloud2.png></p> <p>or a milestone cloud might look like this:</p> <p><img src=/files/milestoneCloud.png></p> <h2> Give us your feedback </h2> <p>First, I invite everyone to give our <a href=http://mockups.sourcegear.com/TagCloudMockup/Query.aspx>Tag Cloud mockup</a> a try. This is an implementation of the web client interface that does not connect to an actual database. We wanted to get a handle on the User Interface issues and get feedback from customers before we began work in earnest. I encourage you all to post your impressions/requests in the comments on this blog post. We want to incorporate the best ideas that you have. </p> Thu, 30 Aug 2007 15:23:00 -0500 urn:uuid:3f4cb90d-8ce1-43ac-9e5c-a3fd146d147f Jeremy http://vaultblog.sourcegear.com/articles/2007/08/30/tag-clouds That's an idea that hadn't occurred to me. I would like to hear more to get an idea of what you want? Assuming that we put a text box in the cloud "window", what would typing in that text box do to the cloud? Wed, 31 Oct 2007 08:42:31 -0500 urn:uuid:fcd4d4dd-e3ed-4925-8d41-7adda673f327 http://vaultblog.sourcegear.com/articles/2007/08/30/tag-clouds#comment-43 We can just enter some search text and show a filtered list of tag's since the list of tags might grow to be big for larger / complex projects?? Wed, 31 Oct 2007 04:15:41 -0500 urn:uuid:6c7e92e5-a7b3-4312-b931-c287639fefd1 http://vaultblog.sourcegear.com/articles/2007/08/30/tag-clouds#comment-42 I love you people George Wed, 03 Oct 2007 22:56:52 -0500 urn:uuid:e267205a-d004-4be0-b8d9-eba66786d9a8 http://vaultblog.sourcegear.com/articles/2007/08/30/tag-clouds#comment-32 Yes, that's how we use it internally, but the beauty of tags is that you can define your own tags that match your needs. I've been toying with the idea of publishing our internal tag-set to show people how we're using tags. Thu, 13 Sep 2007 11:02:08 -0500 urn:uuid:4f3c3450-42c6-478e-af8d-6d32955b18e4 http://vaultblog.sourcegear.com/articles/2007/08/30/tag-clouds#comment-15 I'm just curious... What's the definition of a "grammar bug". Does it mean that there is a grammar mistake in the UI somewhere? Thu, 13 Sep 2007 10:23:08 -0500 urn:uuid:5582e14f-3bb4-41b6-9df8-54bde032cb4b http://vaultblog.sourcegear.com/articles/2007/08/30/tag-clouds#comment-13