Following on from this thread about proposed changes to Feedback, I want to propose an option to Xojo that may or not be very popular.
I think it’s worth discussing if Xojo Inc should just closed and purge all bug reports on their system that are more than 1 year old (the actual time frame is open for discussion).
There are so many bugs logged, many of which are duplicates, many of which have been in purgatory for years and many will be from users who are no longer engaged with the platform and are unlikely to provide further information.
Culling the thousands of outstanding bugs is not an acceptance of them. Nor is it trying to suggest that Xojo is bug free but why not have a fresh start with the new Web-based Feedback system?
This is only a suggestion but if a bug that is several years old is still important to you then re-submit it.
As it currently stands, there is no way that the currently logged bugs will ever be addressed. It’s just not realistic.
Actually if new party was taking over Xojo then for such party it would make sense.
Cull all bugs, mark them in unknown state and ask users to do one time verify if their bugs were still actual.
(To get clean slate). Doing such reboot is probably worse than doing nothing if the intent is not actually to completely change direction and actually focus bugs and keep the bug count down in the new cleaned bug base.
Now since no new party is taking over Xojo then I am not so sure. Reason is even if they were to right now decide to prioritize bugs over features for once then I am not sure the community would believe it enough given how it has been. And if the community is not on same page then this would be fail from start.
After many years of either choosing to ignore or simply not being able to get on top of an increasing number of bugs, Xojo are in a difficult situation.
It’s clear from the recent blog post and forum posts that there is a desire from both Xojo Inc and their user base to improve the stability of the product but staring at thousands and thousands of bug reports from years ago must not only be disheartening but is probably counter productive.
A (near) clean slate will is a gesture of goodwill from the community. We’re essentially saying, “OK Xojo, we know you aren’t perfect and we expect to see the bug count rise but this is your opportunity to keep on top of it. To show us a meaningful reduction in the number of open bugs going forwards”.
For that if I were them I would do 2 or 3 releases of just bug fixes first, win back the community and the community is your strongest ally and will do things for you instead of being the one that beats you down.
I currently have 312 open bugs, 10% of which are probably duplicates or have been fixed by now and 20% I would probably consider critical/serious/portray xojo negatively.
If a “great reset” were to happen, there are the following issues:
Purging would be demoralising and a PR nightmare. You would need a system to move tickets from one system to another, creating tickets takes time, we’ve spent that time already, having to repeat that is bad karma
If you have two systems, you should really let users search both systems as the migration system will need to work somehow
If you do this then you need to decide if you keep the two UI’s separate (feedback app and web app)
Then you run into the issue of should we tell newer users about the old system and scare them with huge a huge list of old issues to search through.
To save having two systems, a solution might be:
Migrate all the tickets to the new system
Mark all the old tickets as archived on day 1
Allow any user to upvote a ticket indicating that this affects them and it still occurs
If this happens and the ticket is an archived one, it will bring it out of cold storage and restore it to its previous glory
There will be an initial mad dash for people to check and upvote their own/favourite tickets but as time goes on this will slow and you will only be left with the issues that really are affecting people
As people search and upvote on the new system you will quickly learn what issues people really care about
When a ticket is added/migrated it should be given a user assigned severity how they feel it impacts their project. The severity of an issue should be evaluated by xojo and given a publicly viewable score, this can then be calculated against the votes to work out its actual fix priority.
This all goes without saying that something at Xojo needs to fundamentally change with the number of bugs being introduced and squashed, if not, they will be back in this situation in a few years and this will all have been for naught.
But all this talk about web bug systems is fanciful considering when it was announced and where we are now, it might just be more prudent to use an off the shelf package and spend some time tweaking it to fit with the systems that xojo need in house. I can just see xojo spending oodles of time on it and it grinding to a halt on day one.
No, I checked the data the other day and there was a marginal increase (maybe 8 from memory) in the number of bugs fixed over a “regular” release. The release also included new features, possibly with more bugs (I didn’t double check at the time).
r3 abounds with more API 2 stuff like Desktop Controls. This may be good in the long run, or may be change for the sake of change. We’ll see. They also have the Android target in beta now. So these recent releases can hardly be regarded as “Snow Leopards”.
I just went through a couple of very old cases of mine.
I find lots of things fixed/resolved or no longer relevant.
I find lots of things, that are still valid and I wrote a comment to indicate this is still an issue for Xojo 2021r3.
So it’s good if an automated system would once a year maybe query if the case is still relevant.
Of course I would have loved if Xojo Inc. itself got notice when fixing a case to have my case linked and closed it as fixed, too.
