The Road Ahead

**Shirik** · 06-07-09, 08:39 PM

I just wanted to stop in to say a few things...

Feedback has been great so far, with a few minor speed bumps. I've spent most of today filtering bug reports to assign them to various versions (currently I have two planned versions - the next minor version and the next major version).

The next minor version will focus on bug fixes which I consider to be significantly detrimental to the program; ones that must be fixed before further progress moves on.

The next major version will implement a lot of requested features and will implement bug fixes or changes which are too large to make it in to the next minor version.

Note: you can always find the latest roadmap at http://www.mmoui.com/bugs/roadmap_page.php

A bit of an explanation about bug reports and my workflow. I use a standard personal workflow. Because it's personal, the meaning of "Assigned" is very little considering the lack of developers on the project. So I've tweaked the workflow accordingly:

New - Nobody has looked at the report. This is why it's big and red and saying "hey this is important!"
Feedback - An issue can get into this state in one of two ways:
- We've looked at the issue and need more information from the reporter to continue
- The issue has been marked resolved, but someone reopened the issue, claiming it has not actually been resolved
An issue in the "Feedback" state should be constantly monitored by both the reporter (or reopener) and developer as it will probably involve constant communication until it leaves this state. A lack of communication for more than one week will result in the issue being closed.
Acknowledged - The issue has been looked at, but we can't quite decide what to do with it yet. An issue will only stay in this state for a few reasons:
- Research needs to be done to confirm that it's a problem with the application and not a problem with a third-party tool (such as Java itself or a user-created problem)
- We can't decide whether or not we want to fix the issue (typically this applies only to feature requests)
- The issue hasn't been able to be reproduced
Confirmed - The issue has been successfully reproduced, and it has been determined that it is a problem with the application itself. Issues generally only stay in this state if we can't figure out the version to which the issue should be targetted. Generally a Confirmed issue goes straight to Assigned.
Assigned - The issue is confirmed and has been scheduled. An Assigned issue will have a "Target Version" marker on it. This associates it with the roadmap by indicating the version in which the issue is expected to be fixed.
Resolved - The issue is believed to be resolved. When the fix version is released, the reporter (or anyone else) should return to the issue and indicate whether or not the issue has truly been fixed, so that it can be closed or reopened.
Closed - The final state of an issue. In this state, all activity will cease on an issue. An issue gets to this state due to one of the following reasons (with the reason indicated by the "Resolution" field on the issue):
- Resolved - The issue has been confirmed as resolved
- Unable to Reproduce - An issue that was awaiting feedback was not responded to for more than a week, and we could not reproduce it on our own
- No Change Required - The bug does not exist, the feature is already implemented, or the issue was due to some other form of PEBKAC
- Can't Fix - The issue is not due to the application and is rather due to a third-party component such as the Java VM
- Won't Fix - The issue was denied (generally this is due to feature requests which we don't agree with)
- Duplicate - The issue was a duplicate (the duplicate ID will be marked down in the "relationships" area so it can be tracked by the reporter)

That being said, there are two major problems with the issues being reported so far, so I'd like to address them now.

There are tons of duplicates out there. - I realize that there are a lot of testers that know little to nothing about developing applications, and that's fine. I fully expect there to be some duplicates floating around, which I will mark accordingly. However, I'm experiencing a duplicate rate of about 50%. I don't have a problem with people reporting duplicates, because I realize that not everyone will recognize a duplicate as the same error can typically manifest itself in several different ways. However, when the problem is obviously identical, it would only take a two minute search to check for that before reporting. I ask that everyone do this search, because while it only takes you maybe 2 minutes to do this search, it takes me about 5 times that amount of time to resolve a duplicate issue (I have to find the duplicate ID, assuming I remember it, mark it, close it, etc.) Lack of duplicates will give me a lot more time to filter through meaningful reports and get things fixed.
There is a distinct lack of log files. - As mentioned in the sticky in this forum, log files are immensely helpful for troubleshooting for almost every error out there. I intentionally take detailed logs. Even when the information is not there, it does help me get a detailed understanding of the environment in which the application is running, which can often be part of the cause of the issue. When a log file isn't attached, I have to send the issue into feedback, which means that the issue will take longer just because I have to wait. Eliminating this time up front only takes an extra minute of your time to upload the file in the first place.

With all that said (yes, I know, TLDR), thanks for all the great feedback so far. I've isolated several signifcant problems that haven't shown up on my computer at all, and generally this is just due to an unusual configuration of some sort. This is what beta testing is all about.

I'm aware that the beta is a bit more unstable than everyone would have liked it, but for a program that's over 20k lines by a single person, I personally think it could have gone a lot worse. With this kind of response, though, at release we can have a pristine application with only minor things needing to be changed around, and modules all over the place.

Thanks,
-- Shirik