Discuss: Introducing JIRA – the new bug tracker

[tbackoff]

I personally prefer the old tracker, but I have to agree with what one of the developers said (ToonArmy?):

we’d rather spend time developing phpBB than developing the tools to manage phpBB development

[mtrs]

I wanted to add a quote from the net, regarding the delay in this topic.

From the area of usability engineering, reaction time thresholds for user perception are known as follows: 100 ms is roughly the boundary at which a user feels the system reacting instantaneously; less than 1 s keeps the user’s thoughts, although a delay is perceived; less than 10 s keeps the user’s attention, while exceeding 10 s implies the risk of the user abandoning the activity. The order of magnitude of the latter threshold has been confirmed by studies of user patience regarding web surfing * A. Bouch, A. Kuchinsky, and N. Bhatti, “Quality Is in the Eye of the Beholder: Meeting User’s Requirements for Internet Quality of Service,” tech. rep. HPL-2000-4, HP Labs, Palo Alto, CA, Jan. 2000.

We can consider JIRA having than 10 s delay , so it keeps user's attention.

[3Di]

at teh end of all, why using a boring system instead of the former that worked very well?

[Highway of Life]

Not really sure why it seems the development team no longer cares what the community needs or thinks with regards to a decent tracker.

[bantu]

at teh end of all, why using a boring system instead of the former that worked very well?

The old system just does no longer work with the new phpBB development strategy (Git, non-linear development, etc.).

[IPB_Refugee]

Not really sure why it seems the development team no longer cares what the community needs or thinks with regards to a decent tracker.

Probably the whole development of phpBB is heading in the wrong direction. With phpBB-4 things will get even worse, as you will have requirements that are not that common. (Maybe a market gap.)

[DavidIQ]

Probably the whole development of phpBB is heading in the wrong direction. With phpBB-4 things will get even worse, as you will have requirements that are not that common. (Maybe a market gap.)

That's pretty riddiculous to say especially since there's not been a single line of code written for phpBB4. Plus you're basing this on...the selection of a bug tracker?

Not really sure why it seems the development team no longer cares what the community needs or thinks with regards to a decent tracker.

This also seems pretty riddiculous. Committing to a piece of software and abandoning it at the first sign of trouble is evidence of a development team with no backbone. I'm yet to see what the difference in terms of workflow is between the new bug tracker and the old tracker. The users creating the tickets have nothing additional they have to do than what they did in the old bug tracker: fill in some fields, submit. With the amount of activity and opening up of development that has been going on in Area 51, the fact that it's now easier than ever for non-development users to provide bug fixes and code through github, and the fact that we've done everything we can so far to get the new bug tracker up to speed to be in line with all of that, I can't believe that anyone would say the development team doesn't listen to the community.

I'd also like to point out that Doctrine uses JIRA as well and it's been going pretty well for them so it's obviously not as bad as some are making it out to be...

[IPB_Refugee]

Probably the whole development of phpBB is heading in the wrong direction. With phpBB-4 things will get even worse, as you will have requirements that are not that common. (Maybe a market gap.)

That's pretty riddiculous to say especially since there's not been a single line of code written for phpBB4. Plus you're basing this on...the selection of a bug tracker?

Hi DavidIQ,

as far as I know, phpBB-4 will require Symphony-2.

And yes, I am really such a simple mind: I truly believe it starts with something unimportant like a bug tracker (which nobody likes except the development team) and it will end with ... who knows?

Unfortunately (!) I'm not really confident about phpBB's future.

Kind regards
Wolfgang

[AdamR]

as far as I know, phpBB-4 will require Symphony-2.

Symfony is a framework and phpBB4 will be built on top of it. Symfony's code that is utilized by phpBB4 will also be distributed in the download package, so nothing will change in terms of the complexity of the requirements.

- Adam

[IPB_Refugee]

Thank you for clarifying this issue, AdamR!

It's really good to hear that (nearly) everybody will be able to use phpBB-4 without any problem.

So I would suggest to go back to the topic and discuss the marvelous new bug tracker the development team brought to us.

Best regards
Wolfgang

[DavidIQ]

Hi DavidIQ,

as far as I know, phpBB-4 will require Symphony-2.

And yes, I am really such a simple mind: I truly believe it starts with something unimportant like a bug tracker (which nobody likes except the development team) and it will end with ... who knows?

Unfortunately (!) I'm not really confident about phpBB's future.

Kind regards
Wolfgang

Ah...I completely understand where you're coming from now. Discussion about phpBB's future can be found in Area 51 where the game plan and future of phpBB3.1 and phpBB4 are being discussed. JIRA has a few important features that helps with the ideas and feature requests that are presented over there. Once the development team decides it should go into 3.1 or 4, a feature "bug" is created that can be tracked by both them and the community.

[Highway of Life]

I'd also like to point out that Doctrine uses JIRA as well and it's been going pretty well for them so it's obviously not as bad as some are making it out to be...

David, there is a sound difference between the demographic of Symfony and Doctrine versus phpBB.
Doctrine is used by developers, as is Symfony. The end-user, the clueless user, your Mom, they don’t use Doctrine. So Doctrine can use as technologically challenging a system as they please.

phpBB is not the same, it’s used by the clueless user, the person next door, your grandmother who wants a website. The thing is, if she finds a bug, what do you think was easier for her to submit to? The old tracker or the new one? Be honest.

How can you say that phpBB is listening to the community when the ONLY topic on the board about the bug tracker switch is littered with a LOT of users who are unhappy...
Has there even been a single user here who has given positive feedback on the new tracker? I don’t call that “listening”.
It’s one thing to make a decision contrary to the will of the community for the benefit of the community. It’s another thing to listen (or ignore) community input. Even if the decision is sound, phpBB cannot claim to be listening to the community, since the majority disagree with the decision.

[Marshalrusty]

How can you say that phpBB is listening to the community when the ONLY topic on the board about the bug tracker switch is littered with a LOT of users who are unhappy...
Has there even been a single user here who has given positive feedback on the new tracker? I don’t call that “listening”.
It’s one thing to make a decision contrary to the will of the community for the benefit of the community. It’s another thing to listen (or ignore) community input. Even if the decision is sound, phpBB cannot claim to be listening to the community, since the majority disagree with the decision.

There are tons of people actually using the new system and very few of them have commented here. This topic is not a representative sample of the community in any way. Likewise, it should be expected that the dissenting opinion will be louder because the rest already feel like they've "won".

So while I'm not really sure that I like JIRA myself, the argument quoted above and the accusation that we "don't listen to the community" is baseless. The whole reason JIRA was installed is so that the developers could better communicate with the community. I think that we should be looking at whether that has improved and not at who's complaining the loudest.

[narqelion]

Has there even been a single user here who has given positive feedback on the new tracker? I don’t call that “listening”.

LOL, sorry I had to laugh at this comment. As far as I can tell no non-team member has ever had anything positive to say about the change (and several team members have privately expressed their dislike of the new tools to me personally) so overall the only people to have benefited seem to be the ones who made the decision in the first place. Since they never solicited feedback from the community during the evaluation and decision making process it seems quite accurate to state they were never interested in listening to what we thought about it to begin with. Did you really think that with negative feedback they would consider undoing the migration to Atlassian based tools?

@HoL, if you want a true assessment, run your old stats again making sure to include all .com team members (including former as there have been a rash of resignations lately) as 'reported by team' this time and you will see the truth of who still uses it. I think Stoker asked for statistics 2+ weeks ago and was met with deafening silence which was an answer in itself. Aside from that, not sure what long term value the data in the tracker is going to provide since the tool itself is not used consistently even by the development team. There is no data integrity when you don't uniformly follow a process of classifying tickets, i.e. tickets submitted as bugs that under the old tracker would have been tagged "Not a bug" are randomly closed as "Won't fix","Invalid" or "Cannot reproduce" depending on user.

[AdamR]

Of the issues 60 created in June, 37 were reported by Team Members or Former Team Members, and therefore 23 were created by non-Team Members. This is quite different than the "stats" HoL originally reported.

EDIT: Please note that the mentality surrounding the tracker has also changed slightly among team members, and we'd like it to be the same for the community. Feature improvements (not requests) or structural change should be posted to the tracker. Not just bugs. As such, a lot of the issues reported by Team Members are not inherently bugs, whereas the majority reported by users are.

- Adam