Problem
Issues in Autodesk Forma are automatically assigned a title based on the selected Issue Type. This often results in issues being created with generic titles such as “Design” or “Design Review”, simply because these are available Issue Types.
Although the Issue Title is configured as a required field, the automatic title means users rarely replace it with a meaningful description. As a result, the Issue Title often becomes little more than a duplicate of the Issue Type.
There is also an inconsistency when users change the Issue Type during issue creation. For example, a user may initially select Design Review, resulting in the title “Design Review”, and then change the Issue Type to Design. The resulting issue can therefore have:
- Type: Design
- Title: Design Review
This creates misleading or inconsistent issue information.
Challenges / Consequences
- Issues become difficult to distinguish from each other in lists, reports and dashboards.
- Issue titles provide little additional information beyond the Issue Type.
- Users have to manually correct automatically generated titles.
- Changing the Issue Type during creation can result in mismatched Type and Title values.
- Generic titles reduce the usefulness of issue data for reporting, filtering and downstream workflows.
- Large projects can quickly accumulate hundreds or thousands of issues with repetitive and non-descriptive titles.
Suggested Improvement
Consider changing the default behavior so that the Issue Title is initially blank, even when Issue Type is selected.
Alternatively, the Issue Type could be used as a placeholder rather than automatically populating the Issue Title. The user should be encouraged or required to provide a meaningful title that describes the actual issue.
If automatic title generation is retained, the title should at minimum be dynamically updated when the Issue Type changes until the user has manually edited the title.
Expected Benefit
Separating Issue Type from Issue Title would make issue data more descriptive and consistent, improve usability in issue lists and reports, and reduce the amount of manual correction required from users.
