Best practice forum (Archived)

Can we have better descriptions in the release notes please

Hi,

I sometimes find the description of the new functionality included in the release notes to be lacking detail e.g. in https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=3074 which contains an improvement:

T-10743 Added course completion enhancements

but what are these impovements?

I don't need full descriptions of how to use the new functionality (although it would be nice) but some indication of what the change has been would be very useful.

I have access to the bug tracker so I can log in and search for the bug item and see what has been done, but it takes quite a long time to look at every item in the release to see what has actually been done. Maybe it would be possible to include git comments in the release notes e.g. from the above ticket:

    T-10743 completion: Add new permission for resetting completion data
    
    New permission is moodle/course:unlockcompletion and clones existing
    assignments from moodle/course:edit

Thanks

David

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Hi David,

Yes I take your point, we do have a specific field in our bug tracker for the changelog message but in this case it is was certainly not a helpful message.

I don't think putting the git commit message in the changelog makes sense as often that can be more cryptic and developer focused than helpful. We just need to do a better job of making sure the changelog message is a clear description of the change. I will discuss with the dev team.

In this case there were several commits against the same bug ID. The enhancements were:

A new option "mark in progress on first course view" added to the course settings and course default settings. If checked this modifies the course completion behaviour - instead of marking a completion as in progress after the first criteria is met, the course is marked as in progress the first time a user views any page within the course.
When unlocking course completion criteria, the user now has the option to unlock criteria without deleting existing completion data
A new separate capability to control who can unlock completion criteria.

Simon

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