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Suggestions to the Forerunner development team

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  1. Swap managers with the one in charge of the Outdoor Recreation series for a month.
  2. Lengthen sprints from a week to two weeks.
  3. Set up a proper alpha/beta programme, where more than late Release Candidates are released. You have willing testers out there. Let them find those bugs early.
  4. Lengthen the time between RC release to full release from one week to three, to allow for more bug reports to be collected and acted upon. There is no way that a week is long enough for this.
  5. Encourage adversarial code review between developers and allow enough time for this.
  6. Build in Unit tests to catch regressions before they're checked in to production. Code coverage should be 85% or better.
  7. Run the code through static analysis tools. This will probably find some memory leaks, null pointer dereferences, and other undesirable behaviours. Fix them.

Constructive criticisms in replies only please.

  • 0

    How do you know, to what are you basing 2, 5, 6 and 7? 
    2. I don't even know they are using sprints, is the usage of one week sprints mentioned somewhere? 
    5. I don't have any idea are they using or not using code reviews. Based on bugs/regressions one can't do that. 
    6. Lacking unit tests and it's coverage is probably true based on the regressions.
    7. I haven't seen problems related to those, so hard to say are they using those or not.

    Then some comments to:
    1. For outsider it's really hard to say what the deal is with these two teams. Is it the team, management or what. But the differences and common code is so big with these, that I'm mostly thinking why the differences.
    3. I think they tried to set that, like in the Fenix, but that haven't be very well taken into the release cycle. Most of the public "beta" has just been RC. Only 14.06 wasn't RC. But no alpha releases what so ever, one beta, rest RC.

  • 0

    Yeah, something needs tuo be done. I'm sure people won't be silent about the bugs that are still there, six months after the release. To be honest, I'm for the first time so disappointed to thia product and this team that I'm hoping the competitors (Apple, Coros, Suunto and Polar) will continue to develop their stuff too. The reason is that I don’t want to buy half finnished product ever again.

  • 0

    We are all constructive - month to month to month ... give feedback, give our time to this forum, ... I hope Garmin will read your advices. It seems that you know sw development processes. But it's again you as a customer who has to tell them how to do better job. It's so frustrating.

  • 0

    I doubt they do anything about it.

  • 0

    My total guess is that during the hyper-growth of big tech during 2020-2022, any good developer Garmin had, jumped ship and joined big tech. Salaries compared to Olathe Kansas were easily anywhere between 2x to 5x so entire development teams could have been gutted of their superstar coders.  That would only accentuate the bad development hygiene that Garmin repeatedly demonstrates by the amount of bugs and general poor SW design.

  • 0 in reply to kalamarios

    What surprise me is that DC Rainmaker who always is the first to review new products from Garmin and obvious get them for testing long time before the release is superquiet when it come to all the software problems. He's good at telling about all the features , wish he could be good to tell about all the software problems too. 

    As long as people only write in this forum and continue buying the products, nothing will change. 

  • 0 in reply to Jano22222

    Well, he did blog about is once: https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2019/06/competitor-software-instability.html

    But I agree with you that he is quite good at summing up the featurelist and testing the obvious (how does the ohr compare to a cheststrap and how does the gpx trail compare to the map). 

    He is less outspoken about usefulness of features and quality of features and quality of software

    To his defence, he mostly has to work with early devices with beta software, so in the final products there will be difference bugs. 

    But he makes a living out of it, and most people want to hear what fantastic device they have bought (most reviews are read after a person buys a device, strangely enough. or not strange, just human. we want confirmation)

  • 0 in reply to Elbo

    Yes , i know that blog from 2019, but things have only gotten worse. Maybe time for some follow up reviews..... 

    But, yes he make a living out of it as you say, and you don't bite the hand that feed you.

  • 0 in reply to Jano22222
    Jano22222 said:
    superquiet when it come to all the software problems.

    That's right! He should be much louder! I recommend that let's write to his latest videos to address the issue. Let's make our voices heard, and not just here!

  • 0

    I contacted Ray about the issue and he answered to his 955 solar review: Here is the comment link for my reply: https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2022/05/garmin-forerunner-955-solar-review.html/comment-page-2#comment-4229332

    I hope it helps!

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