One thing not mentioned in Linden Lab’s look back at 2012 was the change to the Jira. Now it would be easy to rant and rave about why this was a poor decision, but I’ll try to be objective and try to understand what Linden Lab are trying to achieve here.
The one issue I can see with the old way the Jira worked is the amount of noise, with the new Jira there has certainly been a reduction in noise, because except in cases such as the CHUI Project, where people can comment on other people’s Jira’s, we largely end up with Jira’s where only a select few residents, the reporter and Lindens can read and comment on.
Less people commenting will in some cases make it easier to identify the issue, but it also hits collaboration, where people with good feedback, are unable to provide it in the original report. Reading someone else’s comments, can help focus your own comments in important areas.
I recently created a Jira, it got imported to a project that I couldn’t see, so in effect, even as the reporter, I couldn’t see it. This was fixed, but then I couldn’t comment on it. The only way I could update my report was by editing my own report. Now by this stage I could see other Jira’s in this project, so I was able to reference another report, the reporter on the other report then referenced my Jira to update their own report. We had collaboartion between two reporters.
Now to be fair to Linden Lab here, they explained to me that there was an issue with editing permissions in this project, this was very politely explained to me by a Linden and I appreciate that they took the time to inform me about the issue.
However the fact remains that in the new general bug report Jira, I would not have been able to see the other person’s report, there would not have been the same level of collaboration, not that it was a super high level, but that’s not the point!
Here’s another example, Jira SVC-1507 Notices Failing For Groups. This Jira is closed as needs more info, with Maestro asking for people to file a new Jira if they have further information. This is a good example because it’s a hard to reproduce bug, therefore it’s difficult to pick out exactly what’s going on. Linden Lab want some good solid steps to reproduce the bug but it’s hard to get that level of feedback for such a tricky bug. However, there are a lot of comments there, are all of those people supposed to create a new Jira? If they do this individually, there’s likely to be duplication, the individuals also won’t be able to see steps others have taken to reproduce the bug or tips on how to mitigate the problem, in short there’s a glaring lack of collaboration ahead and one thing you really do need with a bug like this, is collaboration.
I can fully understand the frustrations for the people trying to fix the problem if a lot of feedback is along the lines of “It doesn’t bloody well work“. I can slo understand the frustration for the people trying to fix a bug when people are reporting the same issue multiple times over in the comments and aren’t reading what others have already said, I’ve had this at work, many a time and it can slow you down. However the new Jira only partially addresses these frustrations and for end users, it introduces more frustrations.
Now the problem really is, what’s the best way forward here? Linden Lab have shown no indication that they want to return to the old Jira and I can somewhat understand that, but the new Jira falls frustratingly short too, this needs to be addressed, the sooner the better really. The Jira is auseful tool, taking away collaboration, nerfs its usefulness somewhat and yet, it’s in all our intersets for people to report bugs in a fashion that means Linden Lab can fix them. Reporters want to feel they’re not wasting their own time as well as Linden Lab’s.
Personally, I think they should be strict on people going off topic or being abusive in the Jira and switch comments back on as well as allowing people to read other reports, if you’re abusive or unhelpful, you lose commenting rights. That would take some extra administration, but the results should be worth it.
Maybe you should need to demonstrate responsible usage of the Jir, such as reporting a few bugs, before being allowed to comment on other reports, similar in some ways to being promoted in rank on the forums, but these Jira changes really need addressing to benfit us and Linden Lab.
Thank You for this so, so well fitting post!
Maybe one lil thing, i do believe it wouldn’t take any administrative overhead to enforce a politer JIRA speech. There could be comment-rating-system on which all (not only Lindens) could rate comments. If someone gain a limit of bad ratings (maybe on base of given comments and time), it would disable commenting for some month.
Dil 🙂
Good idea, that’s the sort of thing that should help the commentary but also encourage good collaboration.