Well The Transparency Was Great While It Lasted

Discussion in 'TSW General Discussion' started by caspargray, Feb 9, 2021.

  1. Callum B.

    Callum B. Well-Known Member

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    I am not familiar with Kayako or the extent of DTG's internal bug tracking system, but it may be worth considering a public facing version much like what Open Rails implements. That way users can know for certain whether their bug is tracked or not, and there is no communication issues between the development and community teams.

    To be perfectly honest, I was expecting a system similar to this when the Roadmap was initially announced: a Launchpad-like real-time tracker, rather than a written article every fortnight.

    Cheers
     
    Last edited: Feb 11, 2021
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  2. paul.pavlinovich

    paul.pavlinovich Well-Known Member

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    My bet would be that they don't use Kayako for development work, that would just be for service desk tickets. My bet would be that like most of the world DTG probably use Jira for the software development side of things.

    Paul
     
  3. stijn.claessens

    stijn.claessens Well-Known Member

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    I just got a mail that my ticket is logged and that i can follow progress on the roadmap :)
     
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  4. FeralKitty

    FeralKitty Well-Known Member

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    Sharing their bug tracker info would lead to precisely the same problems that Sam already reported on.

    First, Sam spent a lot of time rewriting how the teams worded things so we could understand what the bug was referring to. Without someone doing that, some of the bug titles will probably be meaningless to us.

    Second, Sam consolidated many of the bug reports to a single line item. It was difficult enough having to manage a list of 30-60 bugs on the roadmap. We’d be overwhelmed seeing thousands of bugs in their system.

    Third, fixed does not mean released (or releasing soon). It would set unrealistic expectations to know that certain bugs are fixed yet wouldn’t ship soon. (One example that was mentioned on the stream was the route flags. They’re all done, but DTG isn’t going to have us download multiple 3+ Gb DLCs just to change one tiny thing.)

    Fourth, there’s no one-to-one correspondence between a bug report and a patch note. 20 bug fixes may have been needed to produce that one patched issue.

    Let’s give them a chance to show us their new concept in two weeks that hopefully will be less time-consuming, not more, for them to manage and update.
     
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  5. JZJ90

    JZJ90 Active Member

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    Yeah, Matt said on a stream one night that they use Jira internally.
     
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  6. paul.pavlinovich

    paul.pavlinovich Well-Known Member

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    None of that is particularly difficult, we do the same with our projects and production issues. For example, for each thing you're actually working on you make sure its got an epic. You report on the epics. You use labelling and filters to generate a list that you actually want to show the customer. It just takes some behind the scenes effort to collect the bugs together (they likely do this anyway otherwise they'd be fixing stuff more than once) and to ensure that only the things they want the public to see are seen. You can also use releases to collect what will be in an upcoming release, we use "upcoming" they're definitely in a release and then they get a number like 2021.1 so you know its January for example. Jira has great ways to put dashboards together in Confluence where they could be lifted out periodically to make the roadmap. There are a million different ways to do this that would work for large complex build teams. These aren't unique problems and they don't need unique answers. Dovetail make software, they make pretty special software as far the players are concerned but when push comes to shove they do just make software.

    Paul
     
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