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Use of plural in messages is misleading and scary


Doug Nadel (111) | asked Feb 23 '10, 5:40 p.m.
I've been trying to share a new project and had many problems (mainly because RTC automatically created a change set and associated a random work item with it without my knowledge thereby creating conflicts with my trying to do it manually - seriously violating the principle of least astonishment - but that is another issue).

In the process of trying to get this to work, (before I discovered the appearance of the new change set) I had to try many things that involved clicking on a single entity in the "pending changes" dialogs and performing an action (checkin, undo, discard, deliver, etc). Many of these actions show messages which blindly use plural thereby giving the appearance that changes are being made to unselected items. These messages are in dialogs (warning that I have unchecked in changes, asking if I want to delete change sets, etc) and in the status bar (telling me it is deleting change sets).

I have some other huge pending changes that I was not working with and these messages lead me to believe that, although I had only selected one change set, or one pending change, RTC was deleting all of my change sets and losing all of my work. One, I think it was "Checkin and deliver" said it was going to check in all of my change sets, even though I only selected one. I canceled out of that as fast as I could just in case it was telling the truth. Because at times I thought I was losing several month's work, I think I took a year off my life reading those messages and progress bars and they certainly made getting the job done much more difficult because of the misleading directions and responses. (yes, I made manual backups in the middle of all this, just in case).

I'd like to file a bug report to change messages to make correct references to the number of items being processed, and to show what changes are referred to by the "you may lose work" or the "do you want to check in additional changes" messages, etc. Unfortunately, I don't know where to file that. Can someone please let me know how to proceed?

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Jean-Michel Lemieux (2.5k11) | answered Feb 23 '10, 8:33 p.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER
Please go ahead and log a defect, explaining where you got frustrated the most.

https://jazz.net/jazz/web/projects/Rational%20Team%20Concert#action=com.ibm.team.workitem.newWorkItem&type=defect&ts=12669743980001

Cheers,
Jean-Michel

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