So this report writer thing… seems like a nice idea, but so far it seems completely unusable.
For starters, obvious things like a table of contents should be trivially easy to build, yet in report writer it’s so obtuse as to be nigh impossible – you would think this would have an easy interface, and some documentation that explains how to edit chapter headings… and it doesn’t. The editor that it DOES have, which appears to be the Open Office default editor, is useless.
When I add a use case DIAGRAM I’m obviously looking to put the DIAGRAM into the document, not the diagram with it’s attendent and less than helpful blob of text… which it seems to stuff into the document as an image, rendering it uneditable, and as a result, I’m finding the report writer to be an obstacle rather than a help.
I like Agilian… but I can’t say much in favor of the report generation so far.
The Project Publisher is adequate… but not ideal. When I have a diagram with nodes that have subdiagrams, Agilian tells me that there are subdiagrams when I hover over them. In the published HTML docs, not only is there no indication that there IS a sub-diagram on a given element, but when you click on that element you get a page full of text (most of which is placeholders for content I haven’t written yet, so it should not be there at all in the first place), and somewhere in that page of text is a subdiagram header… so most people looking at the published project don’t even see that until I tell them where to look for them.
It undermines the value in subdiagrams when the reports don’t utilize them adequately.
I hope this aspect gets some serious attention, because not being able to publish the projects cleanly limits the tool’s potential value in our organization considerably.
I will forward your comment about Report Writer to our developers.
About project publisher, could you give an example to the problem of showing only the placeholders? About the indication, do you have any suggestion about how to indicate that an element have subdiagram(s) defined? Would an icon putting next to it enough?
We agree that report generation is very important. Once again, thank you so much for letting us know about your feedback.
Ok, now this is bizarre – after rebooting my computer (due to wierdness not related to Agilian), dragging the image into the report adds only the image.
(Relating to my 2nd comment.)
When I refer to place holders, most of it is stuff that’s already depicted on the diagram, like the list of relationships… which I normally have no interest in seeing, because I just clicked on a picture that shows them, which is much easier to understand.
In the tool, when I hover over a diagram element that has a subdiagram, it shows me a little icon indicating that there is a subdiagram… IMO that icon should be visible even when I’m not hovering over it, and it would definitely help to have it on the published diagram.
In the interaction overview diagram, the interaction elements show tiny version of the sequence diagrams they refer to, but clicking on them takes you to a page of text… and I didn’t see links there to the sequence diagrams, but I might have overlooked them… and I know that they’re there – so someone who doesn’t most likely won’t find them.
Subdiagrams should have a much more obvious presentation, rather than being buried in the text listing all of the entity’s relationships. Things like the list of relationships that are cluttering up the views might be better served as detail views, and I think in all honesty that the majority of the people who view the reports will never care about the majority of the content that they see when they click on an entity in most diagrams. The people who do care are people who should be using the tool anyway, IMO.
I’d like to second this request - what the Project Publisher function needs is the ability to toggle whether the paragrpahs such as “models”, “relationships sumamry”, “relationships detail” and “properties” are shown. This could be implemented in a similar manner to the HTML / RTF reports.
Basically if I could switch all these off I’d have a nicely presented and fully navigable report I could then give to users to view.
Most of the information presented with the current method is only of any interest to myself as the analyst.
Also, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to select which view (logical, diagram or model) to present in the report. I use the Logical view to give my diagrams a hierarchical structure which would make more sense to users as this is how their processes are grouped.
