If You're Lost, Don't Take Me With You · 30 May, 03:06 PM

I logged into Rally today and was greeted with a popup that informed me of a seemingly trivial update to the application:

Essentially, the change is that they renamed some tabs. What’s wrong with that?

Two things:

  1. It’s confusing to the existing users. I’ve used Rally for about 3 years now and I’ve gotten used to the terms they use – confusing or not, I know where to go look for “defects”. Fortunately, they didn’t move the tabs, so I don’t actually read the tabs anymore.
  1. Rally is supposed to be for managing Scrum. Scrum literature employs terms like “Backlog” and “Tests”, so someone who’s trained in Scrum sees those terms and they have meaning. Now, maybe the new terms have more meaning to someone who doesn’t know Scrum, but is that the point? To reach untrained users? One of the key points you hear from people like Ron Jeffries is that Agile requires you to change – if you feel like your existing process doesn’t work, you need to learn something new.

At the bottom of it all, it’s not really about a few words. It’s about the thinking behind the words. Why the change? Were that many people confused by the use of standard terminology that Rally felt compelled to change; yet Rally felt that the change itself was confusing enough to merit calling attention to it? Or was this just a judgment call by some Customer Representative at Rally? Either way, it’s not good.

— Gordon Weakliem

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Comment

  1. I’m the Product Owner at Rally responsible for this change. We were pretty sure this change would surprise some users, and I think you’re the first to write about it.

    We had a number of reasons for the change:

    * We wanted to move to more of a left-to-right workflow to make it easier for new users to get started with Rally.

    * These tabs are visible all the time. Changing the labels to single words reduces the cognitive burden and cuts down on visual clutter.

    * While some of our customers are Agile experts, many are new to Agile. When a large company buys Rally, some teams are doing Scrum already, and other teams have never heard of Scrum. Rally needs to be comprehensible and effective for both groups. (This is a complex enough problem that it deserves a blog entry of its own!)

    Far from being a judgement call by a single person, this was a collaborative decision involving the product management team, customer support team, sales reps, technical account managers, and direct feedback from dozens of customers in person and on our
    customer-only forum.

    We advertised in advance in the application looking for feedback for several weeks with our “2 cents” icon, and got positive feedback from users. We knew that some users wouldn’t have seen this discussion, so we added the interstitial screen.

    We work really hard to make sure enhancements with each new release aren’t hard on existing users. Even a small change like this, while good in the long run, causes a momentary jolt for users as they adjust to it.

    Next time we do this, we’ll include a link to the discussion on the interstitial screen, so it’s easier for you to find the reasoning even if you missed the earlier discussion.

    — Alex Pukinskis · May 31, 01:18 PM · #

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