Re: Acknowledged bug reports

Brandon.ConnectIQ since both Richard.ConnectIQ and you recommended opening new tickets if an old one that was acknowledged haven't been fixed yet, I'll ask it: seriously? No offense, but professional it doesn't sound. I hate when other teams at my workplace make me open new tickets again and again, because it is ridiculous: not only I know that they haven't consider (g-d forbid fix...) the bugs in the already existing tickets, I also know that opening a new ticket will not only waste my time, but also theirs, and the chance of the bug ever being fixed will get smaller by the time wasted on the additional burocracy instead of working on the bug fix.

Let me try to imagine how it would be, from the forum users' perspective: I'd open 25 new bug reports about each bug I reported in the past 4 years and are still not fixed (most of them unfortunately...) of course I'll link the 2 tickets, and maybe I would even use my moderator power to lock the old ticket so people don't comment on it but only on the new one. And that is if I will invest the additional time to do all that. When others will open new tickets they won't be able to lock the old one, so in the years to come users will randomally comment on one of them, not knowing that the "old" ticket is dead, no Garmin employee will read it. Or maybe after reading this (or a comment in the old ticket with a link to the old ticket) they'd assume that they should comment in the new ticket, knowing that Garmin will only look at that.

Or will they? After how many years an acknowledged but not fixed bug's ticket is to be considered stale? Should we just keep "re"-opening these tickets annually? Maybe someone will even create a Chrome extension to do it with only a few clicks...

I'll come back to another idea we discussed recently, about having one ticketing system that is actually used. With all the benefits: 2 way communication, feedback, Garmin employees actually know how many up-voted a bug report before they decide which one to prioritize, etc... you should really consider it again!

Brandon.ConnectIQ 3 months ago

Perhaps we should have just left all of those old reports as there were. I understand your perspective, but what I was attempting to communicate was that the acknowledgement of these old issues was benign—in truth they had already been acknowledged at some point in the past—I didn't want people to assume that these were now getting some special attention.

The specifics are that roughly a year ago, someone at Garmin with admin rights to the forums removed one of the statuses we were using in our bug reporting tool to indicate that we had reviewed and created an internal ticket to track the bug report. The result was that all of these forum reports reverted to the default state and made it appear that they had not been dealt with. I immediately had the state re-added, but there was no way to mass undo the status changes.

In truth, this bug reporting tool on the forums does not work well, but it is the only thing I have available to offer. If I could have what I want, we'd have some kind of external bug tracking system as you suggest (e.g. Jira Service Desk) where we could have more traceability and communicate more effectively about issue status. I have tried to get something like this in place, but have been unsuccessful so far. That leaves us using this half-solution, but it at the very least provides a place that we can regularly check for bug reports and get them routed to the proper teams within Garmin.