iceScrum | Changing the name of an Actor – iceScrum

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  • #778456

    JohnO
    Participant

    Hi,

    1. I defined a new actor in the project settings e.g. “Agent”
    2. I then referenced this actor in a user story using the “@” key e.g. @Agent – this worked as intended.
    3. I performed a search of all stories containing Agent – this worked i.e. it finds the story that references this actor.
    4. Then I went back to the list of actors in the project setting and changed the name of the actor from “Agent” to “CC-Agent”
    5. I again performed a search of all stories using the new actor’s name “CC-Agent” – this worked i.e. it finds the same story as before

    However in that story the old name of the actor is displayed i.e. “Agent” and I cannot make it refresh it to show the new name.

    Could you please tell me how to refresh the story so that it displays the new name or if this is a bug?

    Regards,
    John

    #779485

    Nicolas Noullet
    Keymaster

    Dear John,

    There is no way to retroactively change the name of all instances of an actor in existing stories.

    While it may seem like an obvious bug at first, it is actually a bit more subtle than that.

    Indeed, the actor name is part of the story statement, which is often critical and carefully crafted by a human. Having a hard link so that the actor name change is automatically reflected everywhere is too radical. Indeed, when renaming an actor, you may just want upcoming stories to be affected by the change and not the one belonging to past sprints. Changing past stories indiscriminately could break the trust you have than when you write something, it stays as you wrote it unless you actively want to change it. That is why we decided to loosely couple the actor name so the hard link is made only on the ID.

    In this case, automatic renaming should be provided as an option. However, a consequence of the loose link is that it that such automation is harder to implement, so with an agile mindset we decided to start without it and see if the need would arise. Until now we received very little feedback as the need to rename actors seldom occur and when it occurs, it is mainly at the very beginning of a project where changing the name manually on each story is quite inexpensive.

    Anyway, your feedback is valuable for us and if we notice more interest for automatic renaming then we may implement it.

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