Feedback, reporting issues, and frustration

General
1

I’m now looking at a number of my feedback cases that have been provided with exact steps, video captures, and even projects that are marked a “Closed, can’t reproduce.” This is very frustrating since I am seeing it on multiple platforms, multiple systems, and multiple versions of the same OSes. Add to that the fact that I can’t even track or add to an existing report in Feedback on Linux, and my frustration climbs to “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” level (that’s a John Lee Hooker Blues song reference for the youngsters out there - ).

For my engineering team, such as response is not an option. If the customer is seeing it (especially a customer with a long history with our products), the problem must exist. Regardless of it being a customer system issue or a TOLIS Group code/implementation issue, simply blowing it off as non-reproducible is unacceptable. If we can’t duplicate it, or determine the probable code responsible from the report and logs, we set up remote sessions into the user’s system and run remote gdb, ptb, or Xojo Remote Debugger sessions to validate or solve the issue.

Blowing the report off as “well, we don’t see that, so you’re just SOL” is not the proper way to support a customer. Many times I’ve offered remote access to the Xojo team to look at things that they can’t duplicate, but not once have I received a response to such an offer.

2

I’m sorry our process is causing you angst. The reality for us is that if we can’t replicate your bugs here on one of our engineering machines, we have zero chance of being able to fix them. Even with the ability to remote into your computer, and even if we could see it in action, we still need to reproduce it here.

99% of the time when a user supplies a video, what we see is some extra step that’s not being documented in the steps or communicated in the user’s descriptions (like copying 15MB of text to the clipboard which is described as “Copy Some Text”) and we say “OH! There’s the missing step!” and we can fix it.

That said… I’m looking at your most recent cases which were closed as “Not Reproducible” and on most of them you were the one that indicated that you couldn’t reproduce the problem any more. Our policy in that case is to close the report as “Not Reproducible”. On the others, two or more people attempted to reproduce the issue and could not. To be clear, on the 30 most recently filed cases which were closed this way, only four of them had movies attached.

How about instead of a blanket statement, you provide some case numbers so we can look into specific ones?