In a galaxy far far away Darth Linden and The Empire had dealt The Jira Knights a crushing defeat. Removing their ability to effectively collaborate and greatly nerfing their powers.
The Jira Knights tried to protest, they tried to reason, but The Empire were having none of it and cackled into their bug fixing. The Jira Knights went into hiding, licking their wounds and wondering if they would ever be able to return to their old haunts.
The Empire held firm, until very recently when The Emperor resigned and a new Emperor arrived. The Jira Knights now had a new hope … wait that was episode IV, the Jira Knights saw this as a new opportunity and secretly sent a droid to greet the new Emperor in his office. The arrival of a droid certainly surprised the new Emperor, however he was even more surprised when upon touching a button on the droid a hologram of Princess Inara appeared with the message “Help us Ebbe Wan Kenaltberg, you’re our only hope“.
“I haven’t been called that for … well I’ve never been called that” muttered Ebbe.
Princess Inara’s hologram frowned, which was quite impressive for a recorded message “You’re in Ciaran’s blog, play along.”
“Oh!” said Ebbe, looking around nervously, “How can I help?”
Princess Inara informed Ebbe of the problems the revised Jira had caused not only the Rebel Alliance, but also The Empire and convinced the new emperor that it would be best all round if a compromise was made. The new Emperor agreed and was soon publically responding to questions about the Jira : “Funny, both engineering and product heads here also didn’t like that jira was closed and want to open it up again. Proposal for how is in the works! I hope we can figure out how to do that in a way that works/scales soon.”
The plan was now in full motion and today, the rebel alliance scored a major victory when Linden Lab announced : Changes To Our Jira Implementation.
This isn’t a full return to the Jira of old and there are still a few concerns. However it is a much improved Jira we see being unveiled. All users will once more be able to see all bugs, except of course security bugs, which is a very sensible solution. This means people will be able to search for bugs before submitting their own report and if they see a bug that seems to be the same as their concern, they will be able to comment there and add information instead of filing a new bug report.
Users will be able to comment on issues up until the point a report is triaged. This is still an area of concern as once a bug is triaged, only the original reporter, Linden Lab and an authorised team of triagers will be able to comment. This will disappoint some people because if you’re heavily involved as a secondary reporter you’ll lose the opportunity to add more information. However this is a much better scenario than the one the previous Jira changes introduced.
The old new feature request is making a comeback. This will work in the same way as it previously did but is not intended for policy discussion, so please, no Jira’s about the TOS because the Jira is not the place for such discussions, the forums are, more on the forum later.
One issue I haven’t seen mentioned is whether people will receive confirmation that their bug report has been fixed. Previously you did, after the changes you were told to look at the release notes. Personally I found that a bit rude, if someone takes the trouble to report a fault, they should be informed when it’s fixed. This shouldn’t be difficult to implement. Maybe they are implementing it, I just see no mention in the blog post.
There will be concerns regarding user behaviour. One of the problems with the old Jira were the comments. However it wasn’t just reporters who could engage in poor behaviour, there was also the old Jira dance of you put your bug report in, they put your bug report out, in, out, in, out, shake it all about as the triagers engaged in closing and re-opening reports. Hopefully these issues won’t rear their heads too much, but there will be flaming. Second Life users are largely well behaved when compared to other forum users. Massively recently reported : RIFT willing to ban players for toxic forum behavior. That post opens with:
Official game forums have a reputation for being hopelessly toxic.
That’s true and official game forums are often far far worse than anything I’ve seen on the Second Life forums. This doesn’t mean it’s ok to behave badly on the Second Life forums, but there should be some context applied to exactly how toxic the Second Life forums and the old Jira discussions were, they honestly weren’t that bad. However, the best thing for people to do is to behave.
Overall this is a very positive step and early reaction from Second Life users has been extremely positive.The rebel alliance can be proud of their efforts but bear in mind, the empire is still out there. Linden Lab have opened a forum post for further discussion on the issue, use this wisely. That in itself is another positive step in terms of improved communications.
I think it’s a good balance between what the Linden developers need and what the customers want/need. And it reduces the possibility of multiple reports of the same bug by responsible/trusted customers.
Hopefully, the various scrum team product owners can get a better sample of what’s important to the wiser userbase than what they got from just the people who attend workgroup sessions.
-ls/cm
It’s certainly an extremely positive step, it was extremely important to remove the duplicate report issue, not so much from the LL side, but more so for reporters who would get frustrated about it and may consider not bothering in the future.
Hopefully it pans out well, I have experience of both sides of this fence and can certainly sympathise with the Linden devs on some of the issues the old Jira threw up. Indeed today I’ve experienced a very bizarre end user who refused to listen to what I’m telling him regarding folder redirection and sub-folders, but that’s a different story for a different day.