Ivan, it sounds like you feel that reporting bugs does you or anyone else little good. I’m sorry you feel that way. We fix hundreds and hundreds of bugs (not counting beta bugs) every year. When a bug that is bothering you doesn’t get included, that doesn’t feel good. I get that. I’ve experienced that feeling myself with some apps I use. When they finally fix my issue or issues, I think, “Finally!” And I wish that when we did fix a bug, it could somehow arrive that day in the framework you use so that you’d get the immediate benefit rather than having to wait months for another release. That would make us feel great every time we fix a bug. Perhaps a day will come when that’s the standard operating procedure but that’s unrealistic today.
Few if any software companies have the resources to test every conceivable combination of actions their software can take. If that were the case, there would be no need for beta testing software at all. That’s not the world we live in so people volunteer to beta test software. I personally beta test several apps that use regularly. When I find bugs, I report them. When I have feature suggestions, I make them. In fact, this is true for me with all of the software I use on any kind of regular basis because I assume those companies appreciate the reports as much as we at Xojo do. I have also encountered companies that make it ridiculously hard to submit any kind of bug report or feature request which tells me they don’t care.
Bug reports are how we know what defects we have missed. Some are widespread, cause great difficulty and have no workaround. Those get the highest priority. Others are reported by just one person, are a bit of a nuisance, but can be easily worked around. Those get the lowest priority (in most cases). Like all companies big and small, we have limited resources so we put those resources where they will have the greatest possible impact. That’s just efficiency.
Having users report bugs they have run into and features they would like to see isn’t just important or very important, it’s critical. Every time a user reports a bug or makes a feature request, they are contributing to make Xojo a little better for the entire Xojo community. You are a member of that community. I know it can be a frustrating process sometimes. I can only say that we appreciate the effort and will continue to use those reports to make Xojo better for everyone.
@Christian_Schmitz well that really is wonderful news (sarcasm intended) - that after 10 releases of Web 2.0, Xojo finally has a motivating factor to get Web 2.0 deployment ready. Wow, just wow!
If a customer comes to me and says “this problem is happening”, I will look at my code to see if I can see how it could happen, even if it’s not happening for me. This is a step Xojo never takes, I feel. Without an example project that exhibits the bug every time, the case is rejected. So no intermittent bugs are ever fixed, except by pure chance.
In going back through my feedback cases, I’m seeing something odd: if I click “My Cases”, some very old cases are showing up, even though these are not cases created by me. I’m guessing these are actually cases that I was participating in or following way back in the day?
I also do this, but in comparison I can go for weeks without a single bug report, whereas @Javier_Menendez has mentioned he checks Feedback every morning and begins triaging the reports filed overnight. I am not defending Xojo here, just illustrating that if your workload is like mine, it comes in fits and waves.
Like last week (or maybe the week before) a bunch of people all having the same code signing issue, which was related to an authority certificate having invalid trust, how this happened I don’t know and technically it is not a App Wrapper bug, but I’ve now modified App Wrapper in a way that it can capture this, and with the new Help Viewer, it can provide customers with information on how to fix this problem.
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the following statements from the announcement:
regarding feedback, “it’s something we very much want to improve”
You’ve reduced the quality of information that you provide to your customers. They no longer know if you are able to reproduce the problem (reproducible) so they don’t know if the quality of the ticket is the thing that holding back its fix and they no longer know if you think it’s an issue that needs addressing (verified) so they are left wondering if you’ve even looked at it yet. This is categorically not an improvement from a customers perspective. You have a process to bounce the ticket back to a customer (information required) so until this happens the case can be considered as (reproducible) but you won’t say that. If an (information required) state is reached and the customer provides that, again, from a customers perspective the case is considered (reproducible) until its marked otherwise. So the process of just leaving them as (open) is pointless as for all the customers knows now is that they are reproducible because they’ve not been told (information required). All you have done with this process is put a big sign up to customers that don’t know how the systems works that says “we’ve not looked at this ticket yet because it still has the same state as when it was created”. In all my years creating, working on or with ticketing systems, this is the first time I’ve every seen this happen.
“several case statuses are misunderstood”
The recent change you made to feedback to improve the language on feedback status was and understandable addition to the status of tickets, are you now saying that people are still misunderstanding this? Status changes included copy in the ticket itself about what the change means, Reproducible “This issue has been reproduced based on the information provided.” and Verified, “This behavior has been verified by our testing staff as a bug.” Pretty straight forward language but if people are still misunderstanding this then surely addressing that copy would have been a better solution than reducing the information you provide to your customers?
“Changes in status don’t really mean anything”
I can’t understand how you think this is a valid argument for the change. As mentioned above, the additional information provided gives the user a multistep update during the lifetime of the ticket. If you raised an issue to a random company about something which could take 6-12 months to resolve and they didn’t keep you in the loop as to its progress, you’d be understandably upset, right? I know I would. If your turned up at a dealership to have some someone find or fix a fault with your car and there was a sign was on the door saying please leave keys in the box, imagine how you’d feel if you hadn’t heard anything from them for a week or a month. This is no different. If something takes that long to fix, people can get understandably upset no matter if you provide them with the information or not but to not provide the information just adds to the frustration as is horrid customer service.
All this just smacks of lack of customer care, lack of understanding from a customers perspective and that you are just fed up hearing people talk about the number of outstanding reproducible bugs.
I’ve logged into feedback today, as I do most days, to see if anyone needs any help, to pass some time instead of doing a crossword and as a by product, alleviate some of the work load off you guys but honestly, after this change, I’m feeling like why bother? I now have to wade through countless (open) cases just to see that they are actually reproducible or they have been brought to to the top of the list because someone has requested they be (closed) and its not a new case after all. With this update, you’ve actually reduced the amount of free input you will be receiving in helping your customers with your bugs, bravo Sir, well played.
I do the same thing, but without being able to reproduce it, I can’t know it is fixed. That’s what this is really about. With such a high volume of bugs Xojo receives, there really isn’t time for these “maybe” cases. You all know I have no problem being critical of Xojo, but this is one area I have no problem defending. I’ve been there triaging and working on bugs, and this policy is absolutely necessary.
That is the feeling, and if you read this thread and the one that ispired this, you can see that other user have said something similar. They stopped testing and/or making bug repports because it feels like a lost cause.
I’m glad you see this critical fact, so you can also realize that users feell that reporting bugs does them little good is also a critical alarm for the company.
When you see that only one user has more than 1,500 bugs submited and not solved, other users having hundreds…
The way that FC are closed as not reproducible with xojo not doing any effort if the user dont explain EXACTLY what to do…
Users kicked out from the beta program, forcing having a current licence to test new features, new features tested by the comunity WAY to late to make changes in fundamental problems…
Lots of things that make users les participative and with the feeling that every release there are more bugs than features.
Julian - of course - is more eloquent as me. I’ll try it shorter: how the heck am I now supposed to find out if my bug report has been reproduced or not? Telepathy? Check daily? Not at all?
Post every new bug into the Bugs category here in the forum.
In the desktop Feedback version I could copy everything into an Excel spreadsheet. It’s the work of a couple of minutes to make a nicely formatted email to send to Xojo every month asking for a status update.
If there ever is a web version of Feedback this is going to be even easier.
Yes, that’s very true.
I also do this when a customer reports something and I cannot reproduce it. It does take more time and resources to do soo. But it is also very rewarding you did fix a bug that in the first place could not be reproduced. And do you know what? The customer is even more satisfied because you listened to him and took him seriously instead of replying ‘I could not reproduce this here so we cannot help you, sorry’.
I am not saying that Xojo Inc does not take bug reports seriously but the fact is that far too many bugs remain open. And sometimes these are quite obvious bugs that could be fixed with some extra effort.
Every time Xojo reaches out to its users, every time they try to change things to make their software better, it turns into an argument.
I’m not the last person to pick on people, but I avoid doing so when they come to me for a chat with good intentions.
Some people here seem to think that Xojo is making this kind of announcement only to put its customers to sleep and not to announce real improvements. I don’t know if these improvements will come, but I’m sure it’s not to put people to sleep, because on the contrary it excites them.
I have always learned that when someone makes negative/bad comments, you should regard that as an opportunity. Someone who thinks your product is bad but takes the time to write about it, is still interested in your product. Take at least the same time to take them seriously, listen to what they have to say and try to improve your product, with or without compromise. That is the key to success.
Again, Xojo is a very good product but it could be extremely good when Xojo Inc would listen ones in a while to understand what is really needed to improve and make it even better.
