Drag n Drop for Stories doesn't work
The Drag and Drop to reorder stories (backlog view) is very buggy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, often it just does random things. Sometimes it seems to work for a moment then suddenly changes.
What seems like related problems occur, like clicking on deliver or "approved" buttons will sometimes work, sometimes fail. Or seem to work and then a little bit later revert to the previous state.
The AJAX-y stuff needs serious debugging. Same results on Firefox vs. Chrome.
Only thing that might be unique is we have a lot of stores (like 50 or 80 per sprint). Not sure if that's an issue.
-- David
Support Staff 2 Posted by Rodney on 02 Feb, 2010 07:05 PM
Which projects are you seeing this on? Is any of this reproducible on a consistent basis? You've described a lot of things, but we don't have much to go on with this description. Does this happen when you drag a bunch of things at once? I've tried dragging some things and didn't see an issue. We will download your project to see if it is project related. But, any additional information you can provide, and anything you can provide to reproduce this issue would be helpful. You are the only user that has reported this issue. So, we're not seeing this behavior system wide.
3 Posted by Evan on 02 Feb, 2010 08:27 PM
This also does not work for me in Chrome most of the time.
Support Staff 4 Posted by David on 03 Feb, 2010 05:00 AM
This sounds like a caching issue, though I haven't yet been able to reproduce it.
Please try this url to expire the cache and let me know if it helps.
http://scrumninja.com/projects/1192/expire
5 Posted by Evan on 03 Feb, 2010 05:42 PM
That links fails, image attached.
Could it be because we are project 1518 and not 1192?
Support Staff 6 Posted by Rodney on 03 Feb, 2010 06:19 PM
Yes, Evan, sorry about that. Try it with your project id.
7 Posted by Evan on 03 Feb, 2010 06:22 PM
Yup looks like the caching issue was the problem, and now I can drag and
drop.
Thanks,
Evan
8 Posted by Evan on 03 Feb, 2010 10:52 PM
FYI I happened again for some reason, I expired it and now I can drag, but
there is no ghost.
9 Posted by Evan on 03 Feb, 2010 10:53 PM
Sorry I lied, expiring it does not fix the issue.
Support Staff 10 Posted by Rodney on 04 Feb, 2010 12:21 AM
Evan, can you reproduce this consistently? If so, can you provide us with instructions on how to reproduce it? Which story are you dragging and from where to where?
Support Staff 11 Posted by Rodney on 04 Feb, 2010 12:25 AM
Actually, I just reset ran some cleanup for your positioning. Let me know if that makes a difference at all.
12 Posted by Evan on 04 Feb, 2010 12:28 AM
Hi Rodney,
Just refreshed the page and in Chrome (Linux) I cannot drag any stories. No
perceived improvment.
Thanks,
Evan
Support Staff 13 Posted by Rodney on 04 Feb, 2010 12:31 AM
Hi Evan, please restart your browser. I just logged into your account and tried dragging a few things and it worked fine. Don't worry, I dragged everything back to their original place.
Rodney closed this discussion on 04 Feb, 2010 12:31 AM.
Evan re-opened this discussion on 04 Feb, 2010 12:36 AM
14 Posted by Evan on 04 Feb, 2010 12:36 AM
If it helps, dragging is selecting the text on the card and rest of the
page.
15 Posted by Evan on 04 Feb, 2010 12:40 AM
Are you using Chrome? I can drag fine in Firefox but Chrome doesn't work.
I've tried to force reload the page, but it doesn't seem to help.
Support Staff 16 Posted by Rodney on 04 Feb, 2010 12:47 AM
At first I tried it on Firefox, but I also tried Chrome on mac and it worked fine, too. What is your OS? Have you restarted Chrome? Same result?
Support Staff 17 Posted by Rodney on 04 Feb, 2010 12:50 AM
Also, who are you logged in as? You are an admin, but if you are logged in as one of your team members you won't be able to drag and drop.
18 Posted by Evan on 04 Feb, 2010 12:50 AM
Just restarted and it works now. We're running Ubuntu 9.04. What do you
believe restarting the browser achieved? I thought a force-refresh
(CTRL-F5) would force the cache to be updated?
Thanks,
Evan
19 Posted by Evan on 04 Feb, 2010 12:51 AM
You know, I may have jumped in on the wrong bug here, this whole time I've
been talking about dragging tasks (which does not work after restarting
Chrome). I have been logged in as myself.
Support Staff 20 Posted by David on 04 Feb, 2010 01:09 AM
dragging only selects text suggests that your browser's javascript is somehow fubar'd. which was fixed by restarting it.
21 Posted by Evan on 04 Feb, 2010 03:44 AM
I am now unable to drag tasks, shortly after Chrome notified me that the
page's javascript was taking too much memory. Perhaps the browser
subsequently disables javascript on a page after run away scripts?..
Support Staff 22 Posted by Rodney on 04 Feb, 2010 05:15 PM
I logged into your account with Chrome on Ubuntu and was able to drag and drop. So, do you only have the problem when you run into that memory issue? Perhaps they are related?
23 Posted by Evan on 04 Feb, 2010 06:10 PM
Yes, it also works for me in a fresh browser in a fresh page load. If I
leave the site open (which I would like to do......), eventually Chrome says
"This page took too much memory, refresh to reactivate javascript". When I
refresh, no go.
24 Posted by David on 07 Feb, 2010 08:56 PM
Sorry I haven't checked back. I am a project owner, so I am inconvieneced by this only at the start/end of sprints. :) At which time it is so bad at times that the team figures ScrumNinja is costing us more time than it saves us and they want to just create their own internal tool.
The Elanthia project (on my account) is where we see this.
I understand it is vague, but at during sprint review and planning we spend hours (continulously) in ScrumNinja approving stories, working with the backlog, ordering things, etc. And the whole drag/drop and other features will occasionally work as intended, othertimes they won't, or do funky things like seem to work and then suddenly revert to a previous state moments later. I cannot give youa simple repo, because it seems related to the stress big backlogs put on the system.
Maybe looking at our project (make a copy please!) and messing with it might help?
-- David
Support Staff 25 Posted by Rodney on 08 Feb, 2010 02:49 AM
I've got a few questions for you. Hopefully you can get your team to give us some feedback:
1) Do you notice what exacerbates the drag and drop failures? Is it when multiple people are updating things at the same time? is it when you drag a lot of things quickly? Or, does it not matter and just happens randomly?
2) Tell me more about how you're frustrated with approving stories and working with the backlog. Which parts specifically are slowing you down? is it that there are unnecessary steps in our flow (pending, delivered, accept/reject, deploy)? is it that when you are accepting each story one after another that it takes too long to refresh? I'm trying to understand the pain points.
Support Staff 26 Posted by Rodney on 08 Feb, 2010 06:11 AM
I made a copy of your project and tried dragging a bunch of things around. I even did it quickly and was not able to get it to fail. Do you get these drag and drop failures consistently on a daily basis? I'm just curious. Can you have a day go by without having drag/drop issues? And, is this just on the backlog or is it on the cardwall too?
27 Posted by David on 16 Feb, 2010 12:51 AM
The issue comes up at sprint end/start when we have the typical review and planning meetings.
These take two full days (one each). During this itme we are manipulating the backlog/sprint lists non-stop.
There have been issues in the past related to the card wall, but I'm not personally aware if this problem is still around.
I'm going to try and get my team to chime in.
-- David
28 Posted by Aaron on 02 Mar, 2010 02:35 AM
Hi, chiming in as part of the Elanthia team. To answer your questions above:
1.) I'm having this issue right now. Multiple people were updating things earlier today (with a high degree of success, it seemed), but I am currently the only one actively doing anything. I can't swear that someone hasn't left scrumninja running on another computer somewhere, and in fact, I know I left it running on my laptop when I set it to hibernate some time ago.
I thought at first it might be related to moving multiple items too quickly, as I was trying to push off four similar tasks to the next sprint, but when they all continually popped back up, I gave up and focused on one at a time. At this point, for whatever reason, I've managed to make two of the four stay down through a page refresh, while the other two still insist on coming back. I just tried with a fifth story and it came back as well. Note that it's frequently not immediate; stories will sometimes stay gone for a minute or so before reappearing on the current sprint.
In fact, I thought just now I had gotten one more of the four to stay down, as it stayed away through multiple refreshes over the course of several minutes, but as soon as I moved the fourth away, those last two both came back.
That's all using right-click and "Move To Next". Another odd behavior that may be related was that if I dragged them to the next sprint manually, often when they came back to the current one, they would appear in the position I had dragged them to below. For example, if I dragged a story to the next sprint and placed it second in line in that sprint, when it popped back up it would now be second from the top of the current sprint.
This doesn't happen on a daily basis that I see, but frequently enough that we make note of it.
Related to other issues, some seem to have been cleared up, and the overall performance seems to be a lot better than it used to be. One that I still notice happening from time to time is part or all of a sprint's stories suddenly reordering themselves. That happened while I was doing all the dragging above, but I've had it happen when adding a new story, as well.
The most common error I'd say we run into by far is tooltips getting stuck. Tooltips of all sources and sizes get stuck in the window quite frequently, resulting in a great deal of unnecessary refreshing which, while much improved, is still a bit too slow to be called convenient. The one I probably notice the most is the Help tooltip explaining the purpose of the Owner, on the Add a Story dialog. Once that one is stuck on, you have to refresh or you can't see a lot of the story text you're typing in.
The second most common one I think we see is actions just generally being ignored/reverted, particularly with Delivering and Accepting stories. The delivery part happens all throughout the sprint, and stories are more often than not delivered as requested, but it's never exactly a surprise when they're not. The "Delivered" email is sent, etc, but the story just winds up undelivered. Same with Accepting during the review, except that happens much more frequently, probably due to the increased use during reviews. Sometimes it will be a case of one or more extremely stubborn stories that will just not Accept.
On the card wall, the only dragging issue I ever notice anymore is the occasional quirk where dragging a card just selects the text. I've seen it mentioned that this means the browser's javascript is in a bad state and to restart, but I think it's worth mentioning that I've encountered this in Chrome after having opened no other webpages besides our backlog and cardwall.
Hope some of this helps!
-Aaron
Support Staff 29 Posted by David on 02 Mar, 2010 07:31 PM
Thanks for this Aaron, it is really helpful for us to have concrete information!
This reeks to me of memcache problems, especially how you say the delivery email was sent but the UI bounces back to its prior state.
We will see if there is a caching bug in our code somewhere, but perhaps it is something more on the heroku memcached implementation. If we are lucky this might be fixed when we migrate to their new memcached implementation.
-David
Support Staff 30 Posted by Rodney on 03 Mar, 2010 04:00 PM
Hi Aaron, do us a favor, will ya? When you are having those reordering issues and things don't stick, could you try to reset the cache by going to this url and trying the reorder again? Let us know if that works for you. This will be huge in helping us determine if the issue has to do with caching or not.
Here is the url:
http://scrumninja.com/projects/1192/expire
1192 is for your project, Elanthia.
31 Posted by Aaron on 06 Mar, 2010 12:31 AM
Hi guys, I attempted the expire URL several times, and it hasn't had any visible effect. Here's the current possible chains of events:
1.) The Straightforward:
a.) right-click story and select Move To Next - story visually moves to the top of the next sprint
b.) refresh backlog page, story is back on current sprint in its original location
2.) The Expiration:
a.) right-click story and select Move To Next - story visually moves to the top of the next sprint
b.) refresh backlog page, story is back on current sprint in its original location
c.) visit http://scrumninja.com/projects/1192/expire
d.) right-click story and select Move To Next - story visually moves to the top of the next sprint
e.) refresh backlog page, story is back on current sprint in its original location
I bounced back and forth between those two for quite some time, and had no visible results. So I try:
3.) The Drag:
a.) left-click-and-drag story to second position of next sprint
b.) refresh three times over a couple of minutes; story stays gone
c.) drag second story down
d.) both stories stayed down
Unfortunately, it's impossible for me to know whether something fixed something at this point, or whether it just decided to behave, since dragging was definitely not solving anything before. To be clear, I tried the expire link quite a lot of times with no success, before dragging suddenly worked. I do believe it that it's worked, because the points remaining portion of the current velocity indicator has updated.
Sorry this probably isn't a lot of help. Further bulletins as events warrant.
-Aaron