Tracker: call for your opinions

Permanently deleted user

Created October 08, 2004 15:36

Dear EAP'er,

There is one important issue we would like to have your opinions about: our tracker. Quite some time ago we came to the state where our current situation with the tracker simply does not solve the task it was created for. There are a few issues:

- the amount of poorly processed issues exceeds our abilities to process them efficiently
- the priorities assigned to requests do not reflect their real values, nor contain submitter-specific severity attributes
- a lot of old requests that migrate from version to version with no actions takes
- quite a lot of duplicate requests that aren't marked such
- a lot of obsolete requests not processed in time
- a lot of "To be Discussed" requests that have to be sorted out
- there are many more issues that you are aware of yourself and I did not want to bring here...

So, what we would like to do is to review (and reset) the request database somehow that it becomes usable in the process of providing the best service to our community, customers and teams. Thus, the solution that could possibly work is to allow some time, say 1 month, for you to mark all the requests you consider important and later they will be transferred to the new database. We guarantee that all such requests will be correctly reviewed, planned, etc but we need this help from you in reducing the total number. There are just too many of them to handle, I hope you understand.

Please let us know what you think about it, whatever your opinion is.

Best regards,

Eugene Belyaev
President, CTO
JetBrains, Inc
http://www.jetbrains.com

"Develop with pleasure!"

31 comments

Permanently deleted user

Created October 24, 2004 08:34

+1

"Rob Harwood (JetBrains)" <rob.harwood@jetbrains.com> wrote in message
news:ck6js4$6pi$1@is.intellij.net...

Nick Pratt wrote:

So its a small additional load on the EAP users - as it stands now, I

would bet that a lot of people using the EAP builds dont have licenses,
hence are getting a great editor free of charge - the "cost" of replying to
a few emails every couple of months is not a lot to ask.
>

This and a previous post make a very good point IMO: There is a large
'distributed resource', the EAP users, that is underutilized and is a
good candidate for reducing IDEA developer book-keeping workload. As an
example, the thing that makes successful wikis so successful is that
there are many users who maintain it and keep it organized (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/ for an excellent example).
Finding ways to 'offload' non-automatable tasks to distributed users I
think is the best strategy for solving this recurring problem.
Other possibilities:
- Allow trusted users to organize SCRs into related groups, which can be
browsed
- Revamp the voting system so that it is easy to find items that
really matter, not just have a few loud lobbyists. Something like the
JRating idea would work.
- Have a more unified user forum, possibly wiki-like, which allows
topics to self-organize and bubble to the top. The current wiki is
pretty static (mostly plugin stuff), and not the greatest in terms of
usability. Most discussions are done on newsgroups and SCRs, which don't
'capture' information as well as a wiki-like discussion.

The main point is that our current approach is ad-hoc, rather than
systematic. When we have a problem, we have an informal poll (like this
thread), then interest dies and it is forgotten. We need a more dynamic,
self-renewing, self-moderating approach to user feedback.

--
Rob Harwood
Software Developer
JetBrains Inc.
http://www.jetbrains.com
"Develop with pleasure!"

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