Community Relations Archive

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Flatfingers wrote:

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Tiggs wrote:

Every day the Live, TC and Correspondent bug threads are entered into a excel spreadsheet. They are then sent on to QA to be reproduced and assigned a bug number. From there they are then prioritized and filtered out to the Leads. Members of the Dev team will not know all bugs that are happening. They are assigned bugs from their Lead and those are what they work on. So your statement is semi true, Devs are not shown all the bugs that are entered however, they are told about bugs that impact them.

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Tiggs, that's the fullest description I've heard yet of the process the development team uses to work issues. Thanks for trusting us with this information.

Naturally it raises a couple of questions.

1. An Excel spreadsheet? I'm pretty surprised to hear that. I'm glad there's a tracking system, but I wonder why you folks aren't using some tool that's more specific to tracking issues through a development cycle.

It took a fight, but I managed to get budget to develop and continuously improve an in-house system for making changes (both bugfixes and enhancements). This thing has saved my bacon as a project manager more times than I can count -- it not only controls the process of making changes from requirements to analysis to coding to testing, as well as insuring source code version control, it also exposes this information to those who need it to help manage the whole process.

We've dramatically reduced the number and severity of bugs that make it into production code by using this tool that's keyed specifically to our development process.

2. One of the other aspects of this tool that makes my life less painful is its role in clarifying expectations. Because everyone can see who's assigned which tasks, everyone knows what's expected of them -- we don't get unhappy surprises.

I actually wrote some C and JavaScript code that pulls information from the tracking database and displays it in a nice format. Anyone can run it to see which issues are assigned to them (so every developer know what he or she is expected to be doing at any moment in time), and the status of each issue (so that I and my leads can see where bottlenecks are occurring to direct development resources there).

The bottom line here is that because we make task assignment information visible to every team member, nobody gets surprised by somebody's else work affecting them. That helps us identify and address integration-level bugs before they even go into testing (not to mention before they go live!).

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I don't mention this stuff to wag a finger and say your system is "wrong." These are just steps I've taken that I can demonstrate have paid off financially by reducing our error rate, and that might work for you, too, which would benefit all of us.

Thanks again for the insight into your process!

--Flatfingers

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Meplorium wrote:

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Tiggs wrote:

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Ekymer wrote:
appently no one ever reads the bug threads, not on TC nor on Live. Fanfest has shown several times that no bugs get forwarded to the DEVs.

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Every day the Live, TC and Correspondent bug threads are entered into a excel spreadsheet. They are then sent on to QA to be reproduced and assigned a bug number. From there they are then prioritized and filtered out to the Leads. Members of the Dev team will not know all bugs that are happening. They are assigned bugs from their Lead and those are what they work on. So your statement is semi true, Devs are not shown all the bugs that are entered however, they are told about bugs that impact them.

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It is a shame you have such poor communication. One of the programers that never hear about a bug may have some great insight on how to fix that bug. I personally would have a master list and pass it around to every programer giving them the ability to comment on any bugs they may have insight on, then assign out bug fixes to specific people with the insights attatched. Such a ridged system you have opperating never works as well as a more open freer system. I am sure many bugs can be fixed much quicker or never get pushed out to live if there was more freedom of the programs to just do their job without all the micromanaging.

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Shiznat9000 wrote:

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Tiggs wrote:

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Ekymer wrote:
appently no one ever reads the bug threads, not on TC nor on Live. Fanfest has shown several times that no bugs get forwarded to the DEVs.

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Every day the Live, TC and Correspondent bug threads are entered into a excel spreadsheet. They are then sent on to QA to be reproduced and assigned a bug number. From there they are then prioritized and filtered out to the Leads. Members of the Dev team will not know all bugs that are happening. They are assigned bugs from their Lead and those are what they work on. So your statement is semi true, Devs are not shown all the bugs that are entered however, they are told about bugs that impact them.

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How can the Leads possibly know which bugs to assign to which Dev when the /bug categories are horribly out of date?

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Tiggs wrote:

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Shiznat9000 wrote:

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Tiggs wrote:

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Ekymer wrote:
appently no one ever reads the bug threads, not on TC nor on Live. Fanfest has shown several times that no bugs get forwarded to the DEVs.

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Every day the Live, TC and Correspondent bug threads are entered into a excel spreadsheet. They are then sent on to QA to be reproduced and assigned a bug number. From there they are then prioritized and filtered out to the Leads. Members of the Dev team will not know all bugs that are happening. They are assigned bugs from their Lead and those are what they work on. So your statement is semi true, Devs are not shown all the bugs that are entered however, they are told about bugs that impact them.

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How can the Leads possibly know which bugs to assign to which Dev when the /bug categories are horribly out of date?

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Bugs are categorized much differently then what you see on your end.

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pulverizerjj wrote:

can i get a copy of this excel spreadsheet lol

and since your so talkative today tiggs, putt the recycler bug at the top of the list for me

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Did something happen today?

We've gotten nearly 2, count them, TWO pages of dev posts.

Why can't it be like this every day?

Seriously, though... Good job with the communication. It goes a long way towards combatting the feeling that SWG is going under.

Message Edited by Cutedge on 07-26-2005 07:29 PM

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Ifai wrote:

I must say Tiggs, great communication today. I'm so pleased to see all the new posts everyone under the dev tracker. Its this sort of communication that puts my mind at ease that things are going to be addressed. While I realize this doesn't mean things are moving along any faster than if you were not to say anything, its just comforting.

Keep up the great work!

ifai

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Tiggs wrote:

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MrMon wrote:

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Tiggs wrote:

Every day the Live, TC and Correspondent bug threads are entered into a excel spreadsheet. They are then sent on to QA to be reproduced and assigned a bug number. From there they are then prioritized and filtered out to the Leads. Members of the Dev team will not know all bugs that are happening. They are assigned bugs from their Lead and those are what they work on. So your statement is semi true, Devs are not shown all the bugs that are entered however, they are told about bugs that impact them.

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So.... Please, can you tell us if, after all that proceeding, someone has shown to the Devs the annoying chat windows bug?

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We are hoping to have a fix for this on Test Center soon.

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Tiggs, there is another issue with chatroomsI have /bugged a couple times in game but I want to just give a reminder here (since the chat tabs are being fixed this is probably the perfect time to bring it up).

Chatroom settings get erased with every server reset. This means that rooms that were created private become public, people who were banned are no longer banned the next day, and people who were once moderator of the room lose moderator statusand are in fact randomly replaced by another person in the room. Another potential problem that I haven't been able to verify first-hand is that sometimes when people join a room, they aren't reentered into the room automatically after server reset (i.e. they get kicked out).

Needless to say all of these things are a major hinderance in setting up, not to mention maintaining, custom chatrooms and have caused me to give up on my 3-month uphill battle to create a fully sustainable faction chat channel. If there is any word that is will ever be fixed, that I will consider trying again from scratch but otherwise I'm just going to forget about it. Thanks.

Message Edited by ComCypher on 07-26-2005 10:40 PM

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Ifai wrote:

I must say Tiggs, great communication today. I'm so pleased to see all the new posts everyone under the dev tracker. Its this sort of communication that puts my mind at ease that things are going to be addressed. While I realize this doesn't mean things are moving along any faster than if you were not to say anything, its just comforting.

Keep up the great work!

ifai

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