Finding stories in your backlog, locating a bug that was logged last week and rediscovering the acceptance criteria on an older story all require a good search capability. The need to find specific cards more easily and consistently in a Mingle project, especially with a large number of cards, has been widely requested. And we’ve heard you.
Mingle 12.1 has an all new sparkly search engine that is not only faster and more fully functional, but also helps you find what you are looking for more easily.
What changes did we make?
First of all we improved the relevance of our search results by building our search for a common but specific use case: finding cards! We improved the weighting (or boosting) of the results to ensure that relevant cards are more easily found. We do this in a number of ways. Results are indexed by key fields such as title and description, cards are consistently returned at the top of the search results and only cards (not their children) which match the search criteria are returned.
For those of you who are not looking for cards and want to search for other items, our new search is now faceted, which allows you to explore search results using built-in filters. Each result set is now neatly organized in various buckets - Cards, Wiki pages and Murmurs - meaning that you can get to the type of results you’re looking for, faster.
Finally, since the new search is built on top of Apache Lucene, you can use familiar query syntax to fine tune your search results:
- Search by card type: Precede the card type name with "type:" e.g. type:story, type:bug
- Boolean operators: AND, OR, NOT, -, +
- Nested searches: (authenticate OR login) AND "cms"
By using these syntaxes, in addition to other advanced syntax queries, you can improve the precision of your search and, depending on your task, improve the relevance of the search results.
Try out our new search now and let us know whether your ability to find that elusive card is improved.
Cheers,
The Mingle Team
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Mingle 12.1 also comes with improved charts for project forecasting, collaboration improvements and TFS source repository integration.
Disclaimer: The statements and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Thoughtworks.