Bug Tracker with 20 pages and growing. What is the plan IPS guys?

[estan]

Hello IPS,

In the last weeks, there seems to be not so much attention paid to the Bug Tracker as before. Bug Tracker has now 20 pages of bugs and they seem to keep growing. I have not seen so many pages with bugs untouched/unresolved in the recent past, or at least I do not remember. And I start to be a bit worried.

It looks to me that you guys suddenly decided to focus all/most of your efforts on something else (support tickets, main site upgrade, next version with new features like 4.1 or something else maybe?). I guess it is a strategic decision, but some more clarity would be much appreciated. 

Can you please update us what is your plan with the Bug Tracker? Do you plan to start putting more focus on it as before soon or do you have some other plans?
Should we continue to report bugs in Bug Tracker at all? 
Or should we create support tickets instead?
And what is the plan?

This is very important to know, especially for customers like me that recently upgraded to 4.0 and there are different issues in Bugs Tracker that are important for my community and that wait for a fix.

CC: @Charles

[Lindy]

We've stated elsewhere that the bug tracker is not our sole source for working through bugs. In the case of IPS4, most of the bugs reported and fixed are filtering primarily through the support system. The public tracker will be getting more attention, hopefully beginning next week. Much of this will simply be going through the tracker and marking what has already been fixed (which is a significant amount) as fixed. 

Our primary concern is working with customer impacting issues and these surface mostly through support escalations. The rest will be dealt with using the normal bug reporting process. From a client perspective, you shouldn't be overly concerned with the number of bugs publicly facing in the bug tracker -- many are duplicates, many are fixed and many are low-impact to be addressed. If you are having an immediate site impacting issue, please support a ticket. If you've discovered a normal bug that's not already reported, please use the bug tracker. 

Thanks.

[estan]

Thanks for clarifying @Lindy!  

This helps me understand much better!

I will open support requests then for few different important items that are impacting my community, rather then waiting fixing in the Bug Tracker.

[TheSonic]

Good luck. I tried that, too and was told (two times) i have to wait until the bug is fixed in the tracker. It's open since 31.3. and still nothing happened.
I was told, it's not a impacting bug for most sites...Ok, I was fine with that, but it's impacting my users. I waited again... Hard to believe bugs are not fixed in nearly 8 weeks - for paid software with paid supportplans !

[Sebbo78]

f you are having an immediate site impacting issue, please support a ticket. If you've discovered a normal bug that's not already reported, please use the bug tracker. 

Thanks.

​I´m a bit concerned the quality of these upgrades. It´s like every single time something broke down. This time widgets won´t update (recent topics). In this case how long we have to wait before this get fixed? If it is easy to fix we should get small fix today. This problem reflect straight to my users. Same thing with image upload problem. You must know these bugs. At least i feel that these bugs should get fixed asap. With 4.0.6 i didn´t notice any fixes which would affect to my forum but again one thing went broken. Of course there are fixes which i don´t notice, but this is how i see it. It feels that Staff have other kind of priorities than i have with my forum. And again i have to explain to my users why this and this are still broken and ask them patience and hope that some day IPstaff would fix those issues. 

[Storyteller]

For me the way the bug tracker actually is handled is totally annoying. It should be borne in mind that the bug tracker is "the window" to a lot of existing and potential new customers. If someone would like to inform about the current state of IPS4, because he wants to update/convert his forum, one of the first ways should not be rare to take a look in the bug tracker. And what do you think he will think when he sees 500 pending bugs? He may very quickly come to the conclusion: no base for an update or a conversion.  
What about the customers with a test install? The only place they can deal with is the bug tracker because:

But how should it work satisfactorily when the tracker is something like dead for a couple of weeks?

To make the whole situation really confused, you can still read such statements (just one week old):

In addition there are examples like that from @TheSonic above.

As stated at the beginning of the posting: All that make the situation totally annoying. I think you should reconsider your attitude to the bug tracker thoroughly. 

[sasiko]

is it too much work for the support staff dealing with the bug via ticket to just create the bug ticket on public bug tracker to let everyone know that theres a bug rather than letting someone create one and get no response. this gives customers impression that they are being ignored. i know some staff actually create bug ticket and reference ticket id but not every staff does it.  maybe consider standardize the procedure since this also help the developers from going through less dublicates bug tickets.

you are just creating more workload than it necessarily needs to

[Joel R]

you are just creating more workload than it necessarily needs to

​Or ... maybe they're doing no work by totally ignoring the bug tracker!

[Charles]

Yes we have taken the last few weeks off.

[NorCan]

I recently asked a similar question regarding the bug tracker and the Invision Power's focus on dealing with bugs in general.

Charles responded promptly and professionally. Read it here.

[Charles]

We actually closed out over 100 reports in the bug tracker yesterday

That was the point I was trying to make: many things in the bug tracker are already fixed through our other focus areas. We just need to do a sweep of the bug tracker a bit more often I think.

[Sebbo78]

We actually closed out over 100 reports in the bug tracker yesterday

That was the point I was trying to make: many things in the bug tracker are already fixed through our other focus areas. We just need to do a sweep of the bug tracker a bit more often I think.

Yeah, i saw that yesterday. Actually you asked person to upgrade to the latest and closed that bug right away. Of course you asked person to contact again if bug is still ther. Why not close all bugs after new version and ask to add bug again if needed? That way you could have zero bug after new version!!

[Joel R]

Yeah, i saw that yesterday. Actually you asked person to upgrade to the latest and closed that bug right away. Of course you asked person to contact again if bug is still ther. Why not close all bugs after new version and ask to add bug again if needed? That way you could have zero bug after new version!!

That's brilliant! They should just wipe out the bug tracker every time and that proves they have a perfect software each upgrade! 

Problem solved.  Technical debt: 0

Client satisfaction: Amazing.  

[BN_IT_Support]

Yeah, i saw that yesterday. Actually you asked person to upgrade to the latest and closed that bug right away. Of course you asked person to contact again if bug is still ther. Why not close all bugs after new version and ask to add bug again if needed? That way you could have zero bug after new version!!

​That happened to me.  I posted what I took to be a bug, it sat for several weeks and was then closed with just a message saying to submit a ticket if I still had a problem.  As I don't plan on upgrading for several months I haven't bothered submitting any more.

[Ryan H.]

​That happened to me.  I posted what I took to be a bug, it sat for several weeks and was then closed with just a message saying to submit a ticket if I still had a problem.  As I don't plan on upgrading for several months I haven't bothered submitting any more.

​It couldn't possibly be that your bug was probably addressed by other fixes during the upgrade and they wanted you to confirm.

[estan]

Few answers by Charles that helps clarify further
 

We are currently focused on fixing issues both submitted via tickets and those that we are aware of separately. Many in the bug tracker are actually already fixed and every so often we go through and make a sweep through them. For example, on Thursday we marked fixed dozens of bugs in a short period as they were already sorted through other routes.

So I would pose a question to you: do you obsess over the raw count in our bug tracker or do you worry about those that may actually be impacting your community? If it's the former then you're in for a lot of self-inflicted stress for no reason. If it's the latter then feel free to submit a support ticket and we will look into any issues impacting your ability to enjoy the Suite on your community.

You might have 50 bugs in the tracker that are "there's a typo in this language string." Obviously we will fix those but do they indicate a "technical debt" as such? No... just a simple entry that will be sorted in due course.

To answer your question more directly: we do not pay any attention to the count of bugs we pay attention to the priority of client-impacting issues. Further to this I might add that a "client-impacting issue" might not even be a bug. It might be something that's confusing, missing, not working as expected, things running slowly, using a lot of memory, and the list goes on. So again I say don't obsess over the bug tracker because we don't  ... there's a lot more to making software than staring at a bug tracker list all day.

 

​

​My point is that the bug tracker is only a tiny piece of what happens in development.

As a simple example: we did a lot of performance improvements in the 4.0.3 release and many clients reported back that it has really improved things. That certainly didn't show up as a "bug" we could cross of the list but it was an engineering improvement that benefited every client.

Other examples of "nothing to check off the bug tracker list" might include:

• File system improvements coming in 4.0.5
• Everything that was in 4.0.2
• Fixes found from support tickets from non-technical users who do not know how to submit a bug to the tracker
• Dozens of small "clarification" changes we make for things that are not broken but could just be made easier
• And so on 

 

​

​Trust me we are working hard on getting things sorted 

Keep in mind as much as issues are important to you... we are the ones who have to sort out all the requests coming in so we really want them fixed!

Luckily we are finding that each release we make is improving things. It's so nice when you can reply to a support request with "try upgrading" and the client comes back saying that fixed it.

So we really think that over the next few weeks things will really start to firm up. I'm sure everyone can agree things are already way better now than when we first released 4.0.0 just one month ago. So imagine where we will be one month from now!

We sincerely appreciate everyone's patience and understanding and are really grateful that so many people recognize that, while there are still teething problems with 4.0, each release keeps making things even better. The future really is bright once we get past this initial phase  

​

 

[BN_IT_Support]

​It couldn't possibly be that your bug was probably addressed by other fixes during the upgrade and they wanted you to confirm.

Of course. ​In which case it would have been nice if they had said 'we think this is fixed in version xxxx, please upgrade and let us know if you're still having a problem' - rather than simply marking it as closed.  I'm just saying it isn't really encouraging.

[Joel R]

Of course. ​In which case it would have been nice if they had said 'we think this is fixed in version xxxx, please upgrade and let us know if you're still having a problem' - rather than simply marking it as closed.  I'm just saying it isn't really encouraging.

​Given that their priority is NOT on the public bug tracker but on their internal priority list from support tickets, they're obviously taking a more nonchalant attitude towards the bugs in the public bug tracker. 

Whether or not that's "encouraging" to you is a different matter, but it's been made clear that they're uninterested in providing such administrative details on the bug tracker.  

You can look at it in two different ways:

• They don't know what they're doing -- in which case, as a client then yes you should absolutely demand they mark and resolve each individual bug report that you submit since you alone know the flaws of the software.  
• They know what they're doing -- in which case, then you should continue to post bug reports as much as possible but recognize that  they also have an overwhelming amount of critical issues submitted through support tickets from a far larger client base, which allows them to address the bugs that are higher priority.

I personally agree that they can do more to communicate and engage the community members on the exact details of the bugs in each release.  But ... communication has never been a strong point of IPS.

 

[BN_IT_Support]

I don't doubt that they know what they're doing and IPS's support-ticket support is second to none.  Maybe a bug tracker is of more value during beta stages and a support ticket system for production software?

[Charles]

I personally agree that they can do more to communicate and engage the community members on the exact details of the bugs in each release.  But ... communication has never been a strong point of IPS.

​We post preview topics that clients can post in, we post release notes, we do have the bug tracker and you can "follow" any bugs that are of interest to you (note that none of these things were done back in 3.x times so this is all new). I'm surprised that you personally think that.

Yes we often close bugs that we believe to be fixed. No we don't always say "reply back if it still happens to you!" because... we sort of assume people will Obviously is something is still a problem we do expect people to raise a ticket or reply to a report saying so.