How good is the Jira system?

In a recent thread a complaint was made of a Jira that highlighted a real problem, but after two years it had not had one reply from a Linden nor had it been assigned to any Linden, despite having quite a number of votes.

So, generally speaking:

a) How useful is the Jira system, in terms of its success rate in getting issues fixed?

b) Has LL ever published how many staff they have dedicated to dealing with Jiras??

c) What factors contribute to a Jira getting taken seriously by LL (and by that I mean in getting them to answer, to assign someone, and eventually get an issue fixed)?

d) What is your #01 Jira that is still open that you feel is a scandal that it has not yet been closed?

e) Which Jira has been open and unassigned the longest?

f) I get the feeling looking randomly among the Jira entries that many are in the 'suggestion' or 'wish-list' categories. Should these really be in a Jira, or should a separate system be put in place to separate the 'issues' from the 'suggestions'?

Rock

The Jira is ..... I don't like it, I don't like seeing issues resolved as needing more info and I don't like the Jira politics but it does have uses.

Jira with lots of votes that at some point needs to be fixed because it impedes social networking:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-2833

I can understand why it's problematic but they need to resolve it, having two different kinds of groups where one doesn't check land permissions would surely be the way to go.

My Jira's

Change the land buying window for estate land:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3359

Fix the classified clicks so they reflect how many clicks have been made since renewal, not since first placed:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-9182

As for how Jira's get fixed, it's when LL notice them and know they can fix them, number of votes is irrelevant. The system is useful, LL need us to report bugs and we should do so, I'd encourage people to use it but don't think that a popular issue has any more weight than an issue with one vote, it doesn't work that way.

One of my favorite jiras is http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-93 which is always handy to spring on new scripters when they think they might be starting to understand quaternions.
According to the jira system itself, that would be http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-17[url], "Parcel -> Permissions -> No Fly -> disallow client-side override," but there's probably no point in trying to look at it: it generates a permission violation, at least for me. (SVC-1, "XMLRPC calls timeout frequently" was created the same date and is also unresolved and unassigned; despite the lower number, it sorts as having a later creation time.)
[quote]f) I get the feeling looking randomly among the Jira entries that many are in the 'suggestion' or 'wish-list' categories. Should these really be in a Jira, or should a separate system be put in place to separate the 'issues' from the 'suggestions'?[/quote]There's a separate class of jira issue, called "New Feature", that captures those. It's very often useful to have both kinds of issues searchable in the same system, for example when looking for confirmation and workarounds to LSL misfeatures and limitations. It's easy enough to just turn off that issue type when looking for bugs.

The jira is pretty effective at getting developer attention to regressions or serious problems with new releases. Old, chronic issues get no attention, but then that's not the fault of the jira system, per se; it's a management decision to prioritize urgency over importance.

It might be useful to be able to vote against jira issues, but leaving a comment before the issue gets assigned is usually enough to prevent Very Bad Ideas from being implemented.

Not fair to include SVC-17, "no fly" would be pointless even if it was implemented server-side.

SVC-22 is probably the oldest unfixed problem that's really a problem.

JIRA sucks - it is hard to figure out how to do a decent search. It appears, to this random user, that the decision of what to fix is pretty random -- or maybe they fix the ones that the **right** people bitch about.

The Jira makes me cry.

The only problem I have with the Jira is that the Lindens are wasting time on fixing stuff that isn't broken (by breaking things that shouldn't have needed fixing) instead of using it.

I don't like JIRA much either, too many options on screen at a time.
However the pJIRA system is not to blame for what Rock is describing here.
It would not matter how great the public bug tracking system was, Lindens will still ignore what they want and still only work on what they want. All companies do this for supporting the outside world. Nothing will change that.

jira is a waste of time.
im convinced its only purpose is to keep bug and complaints hidden from view.

better suggestion?

the problem as I see it isn't so much the system, as lack of understanding how to use it.

It's not designed for public use, so the public doesn't know how to use it. but I have yet to see a public system do better, especially given the clutter and misunderstanding about it's design functionality.

If you have a specific issue to espouse, it helps to go to the bug triage meeting:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Bug_Triage

But, this is run similarly to a bug triage meeting in an engineering group, except that squirrels, wolves and bunnies attend, relatively peaceably. Read the rules on how the meeting works before you go. You can, with a little more work, arrange for your bug to be on the agenda for discussion.
.

Unfortunately, this is easier if you don't live in the US.

What?

Well, some of us have to be at work during work hours.

yes.
they could take note of the constant complaints made over the years and actually address them. one shouldnt need to go post a jira on something the lindens have getting complaints about for years already.
i dont think the problem with the jira is peoples use of it, its the lindens nonuse of it. why bother submitting to jira to be ignored the same issues that are ignored everywhere else?

semi-useless unless its something earth shattering, mines been there ages too

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1809

People are thinking they lost no-copy items because of this every day, everytime I get a "I bought xxx and only have a folder with notecards in" this is what they have done.

LL must get constant object loss complaints because of this problem also, and I cant even see why its so hard to fix, but will it ever be?

Hmmm. Looks like your Jira has been moved to http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-10547

I've voted for it Craig - I get the same problem.

thanks


Seems nuts to me they havent touched this, it happens every other day nearly, sometimes its quite old players that have done it.

I cant say ive ever found the ability to drag a whole folder of items into a prim useful but I guess it must be to some, but how hard to make it so you need to hold ctrl to do it, or be in build mode?

this "feature" does more harm than good as it is at the moment

Hmmm, indeed. It automagically redirects there, but it's a mystery why it got renumbered in the first place. (I went there intending to vote, but found I'd already voted. Not sure if that's because the jira is so old or if I'm just absent-minded.)

One thing I've never quite understood is the process *after* the triage when an issue gets "imported." I gather that's what gets the issue into the Linden-internal tracking system (another jira instance? another view into the same jira database? not sure). What I wonder is if there's any point to voting up a jira at that point. Is there any history of stuff getting prioritized based on resident input after it's been imported?

I'm not sure it's a good idea that there are two issue-tracking systems anyway. Assuming issues in the internal system get annotated with some developer chatter, it could help residents know that they at least understand the problem and are working on it, once its assigned.

I know about that Qie, what I meant to say was, that despite a New Feature issue the Bug Reports are still full of suggestions and wish-lists. It appears that no-one at LL is even giving the Jira a cursory check to move posts to the correct New Feature issue.

Item 5 of the Jira 'How it works' states:
Those issues which are acknowledged by Linden Lab are "imported" into the Linden Lab internal copy of JIRA. This means a bug will be investigated and worked on.

This means that there are two Jiras, the public Jira, and a smaller subset, the LL Jira.

Despite what they say in Item 4:
Votes, as well as events like bug triages, help prioritize the issues.

It is clear that the word 'help' is very loosely interpreted, as others in this thread have pointed out. It would appear, basically, that unless a bug that is of concern to residents happens to match a concern that LL also has (ie in the case of a recent united vendor rebellion that led LL to fear a threat to revenue streams), then no action will be taken.

I think the days of fixing Jiras to just make life more pleasant for the resident are long over. Unless you can think of of a good reason why a particular bug you are thinking of reporting could have a financial impact on LL, which would then make them sit up and take notice, then forget it.

Rock

FTW!

As someone who was active at one point in bug triages but isn't as much anymore, my caveat to that is that if you give an excuse to just pass over the issue such as it not having any recent updates, or needing more info, it will get passed over and the issues that really get the most attention are the new and interesting bugs that catch people's attention.

It's unfairly skewed against important "boring" issues and I doubt that's going to change because at the end of the day the agenda is created and controlled by humans, mainly a small group of volunteers and Alexa Linden.

Not a seasoned forum user here, you would think after 2 years, but what is Jira?

It got moved because it's a VWR bug, not a MISC bug.

the JIRA is a thing carefully hidden away, it also cant accept your SL password if your password is complex(ie if it includes stuff like $%^^&&, this in itself makes me laugh after that campaign LL did for people to have complex passwords when their email change page, the JIRA and now Xstreet will NOT accept complex passwords, yet the SL site and the SL client WILL.

Whats even funnier is I opened a support ticket complaining I need to change my pass if I go to Xstreet or the JIRA, they told me to open a JIRA on it, but anyone who would vote on that(people who also use complex passwords) wouldnt be able to because the JIRA wont accept their passwords.

Sorry I digress, the JIRA is for reporting problems with SL, it was hidden away in the same way the grid status was, because its embarrassing

Thanks; that explains that.
I hadn't realized it was *that* broken, but I've been wondering lately whatever happened to single sign-on. At one point there was a slightly brain-damaged effort to make user authentication apply across all of secondlife.com. (Slightly brain-damaged because, as I recall, the originally proposed scheme would break multiple viewer logins from the same machine.)

What's weird is that, since then, there's been a proliferation of sites that don't know about existing account authentication on the main secondlife.com website. In fact, the forums are about the only thing that does work. I'm pretty sure we must login separately--with the same ID and password--on the wiki, the blog, the jira, the support portal, and XstreetSL, all independently of the main account login. There may be others, too. Never mind the viewer itself. Doesn't this all seem a bit amateurish?