Hi Geoff.
What happens if a bug affects lots of users but the person who created it doesn’t respond? Will the bug still get closed putting the responsibility onto each interested person to log their own version (thus creating duplicate bug reports).
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Here’s my thoughts on feedback:
- Give everyone the ability to upvote a ticket, essentially assign one point, get rid of the existing system, its a complete waste of time. If you have to assign more points to current customer tiers, just add a few more points to their votes.
- Have no limits on the numbers of votes people can cast on different tickets, but allow one vote per ticket. If you don’t do this then you have zero idea about how many issues are actually effecting people beyond the 5 they are limited to.
- Go back to having Xojo confirming bugs that are found by users. Have this shown to the user or you end up upsetting your customers as they have no idea if anyone is listening or caring about their bug
- If a bug is still open after a release, have it automatically bounced for a user double check
- Allow anyone to confirm 4) not just the original author
- When you migrate to the new feedback system, cut all old bugs, leave them in a separate system and implement a way of easily searching for them and bringing them across for all users, not just the ones that found them originally. This will allow users to quickly tell you that its still effecting them and so they don’t have to spend time entering the bug into the new system. You could skip this and just reset all points to 0 and initiate a staggered automatic checking of the tickets as in step 4)
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The chain is:
Bug reported.
Reviewer confirms or discards it.
Confirmed:
Bug enters in a queue and will not be closed until an engineer gets the task for fixing it.
An engineer gets the bug report from the queue at some point, and confirms or discards it:
Confirmed:
The engineer fixes it.
Nothing stops someone other than the Feedback’s OP from adding comments or adding a sample project, if they’re that interested and the OP has given up.
A bug with lots of users subscribing (or commenting) on it would “have activity” on it and thus would not meet the closing criteria.
The owner will still get to decide if the bug is important or not and cause it to be closed if they don’t reply.
The only closing acceptable criteria are (cascading, order of time):
- Bad report, not enough data. Ask for a complete case or close it.
- Reviewer couldn’t reproduce it using current product. Close it.
- The engineer couldn’t reproduce it using the current product. Close it.
- Engineer fixed it and the QA reviewer assured it. Close it.
This approach has its strengths.
The RemObjects team do this. They make a compiler that compiles several languages (not really a direct competitor to Xojo as they have no GUI designer in their IDE, nor any desire to have one).
You post about a bug on their forum and if a team member confirms it’s a bug they add it to their bug tracker. End users can view the status of the bug repair but the team get the benefit that every bug in the tracker was entered by one of the development team. That keeps the noise down a lot I suspect.
When the bug is closed it links back to the original forum thread too. Nifty.
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I understand that change can be upsetting, I can assure you that this is not nefarious. The purpose of this is just to help us better manage the Feedback queue. I think the “many months” part does come across as too frequent (I’m in favor that number being in the 30s or even higher such as a few years), but don’t skip over the “has had no activity” part which is important and will keep even older cases open.
As an example of old stuff, there are many cases in Feedback that are about Real Studio and no longer have any relevance to Xojo. Should those be kept open forever? Perhaps you think they should be kept open until a person can review them and make a determination. This is a perfectly valid opinion to have and is what we have been doing for the most part. Unfortunately, like any company Xojo has limited resources. We are trying to best use these resources so that we can focus on and fix the things that matter most to you.
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Crowd fund it, have a slight renewal discount for every ticket checked, I emailed xojo about this and other things a long time ago.
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This is your job and not ours.
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I have been trying to keep up with my issues. But not even totally dead issues have been closed on request:
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I checked my oldest open bug reports:
29899 - Example DragToFinder doesn’t give a Msgbox Result: from 2013, still not fixed after 8 years!
26094 - ClearRect on ContainerControl with BackColor not working properly: also from 2013, also not fixed.
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Feature request: allow OP to close their own tickets. That will save Xojo some time.
Edit: Thank you Julian, you are right (see comment 2 below)
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But haven’t you just renamed the visual presentation of Verified and Reproducible to Open, as I understand it you have an additional hidden allocation system on tickets anyway? I really can’t get my head around “Because several case statuses are misunderstood, we are simplifying them.”
As it stands right now, I as someone that helps xojo find bugs, now has a harder time seeing the status of recently updated projects so I don’t know if I need to help a ticket be reproduced or not. Even if I go into the ticket, all I see is this;
This behavior has been verified by our testing staff as a bug. (Build 55003) Status changed from 'Open' to 'Open'.
What use is this to your customers or those that help you with bug hunting?
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They can request it, but its not obvious, just click the Status link at the top of the ticket, allowing a user to alter the ticket without a double check is not safe, if someone gets upset they could nuke all their tickets, if I did that xojo would lose track of 100’s of confirmed bugs.
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And it doesn’t do anything as can be seen with my screenshot.
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You didn’t do it as I mentioned, I see Alberto has just done it for you 
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I think what Julian is saying is that you added a comment to your case and not a “formal” request to close. For that you need to click “Open” and choose action “Close case” and add a reason.
Like I just did on that case.
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But yes, it would seem that ticket hasn’t been looked at once since at least October 2017 which is 