What is Bulk Edit?
Spira provides a granular privilege called "Bulk Edit" applied at the roles. As Spira applies role-based privilege at the artifact levels to the users, any project member's ability to do certain things is based on the role they are associated with. A user with this bulk edit option can do certain things at the detailed list levels as well as in the card level instead of looking at the workflow operations. Such a need arises when teams are working in an environment that requires members to make updates to multiple items.
Turning Bulk-Edit off for a specific Role
When the Bulk Edit option is turned off, then, the user associated with these roles can't do the following things.
- Change any properties including the status in the list/grid view in bulk for specific artifacts
- Move the cards in the planning board (which is to facilitate Kanban functionality)
- Move the cards in the tracking board (which is to facilitate Kanban functionality)
- Edit the cards inline in the popup view in the board (planning and tracking)
- Can add, delete, modify folders for the artifact they have bulk edit permissions for
Let us illustrate these options
In order to illustrate this, let us compare how the Spira interface looks like for a product owner (who has the Bulk Edit turned on by default) with an existing Manager role where the bulk edit is turned off (not checked for all the artifacts) as illustrated below.
Manager Role is setup without Bulk Edit privileges
Summary of Screenshots showing the Differences
The following table summarizes with screenshots how the options look for a two different users.
- One is a System Administrator having the Product Owner role with the Bulk Edit option.
- The other is a Project Member with Manager role without the Bulk Edit option.
The cells summarize the behavior with link to a screenshot showing the impact.
Recommendation
- It is recommended that at least one important role has the Bulk Edit privilege turned on to facilitate the above needs. For instance, the project manager or the product owner can have the default product owner role so that these responsibilities can be executed more effectively while the other project team members need not have this bulk edit.
- Similarly, some organizations may have dedicated roles for handling some artifacts (like the Business Analyst for Requirements, QA Manager for Test Cases, Risk Manager for Risk, etc.). Therefore, these roles can be set up with Bulk Edit permissions turned on only for those artifacts.