Establishing a "real" issue tracking system?

[z0ttel]

Hello everybody,

I know that this topic has already been discussed in the past but I think it still gets more and more important which each (BETA)-patch we get.

Currently all issues, flaws, requests for improvement reported by the community are spread over several threads and subthreads. Sometimes, there are up to four different threads used for reporting for one single game version (announcement thread, BETA-thread, final release thread and the remarkable Insuber's thread).

This leads to the situation, that valuable information is stored inside this forum, but it's very hard (nearly impossible in some cases) to find. I assume that even for 1C it's hard to maintain the overview of all reported issues with all the related details, which could explain the *ehm* interesting choice of some bug fixes ;)

So my idea is to re-think about the implementation of a *real* issue tracking system like Bugzilla, Mantis, ... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_tracking_systems).

The benefit would be that all items reported by the user would be stored in one single data base. For each report a set of mandatory data could be defined which must be entered by the user (game version, system specs, category (FM, DM, ...). Because all this stuff is stored in one data base, searching for already reported items would become very easy - most of the issue trackers are able to accept user-defined queries to search for specific items (e.g. "all FM-related issues since version 1.01.000").

As far as I remember there was no response from 1C if they would like to setup/participate in such an issue-tracking system, but even if they decide not to participate, that system would nevertheless be a great improvement to our current situation.

Being a software-developer myself, all I can say is that I would have gone nuts already several years ago if we wouldn't have used such a system in our company.



Maybe it's possible to use the issue tracking systems provided by the big project hosting sites like sourceforge?


What do you think?

[jimbop]

Not trying to be rude but without dev involvement what is the point?

[Strike]

I'm 100% for this idea. A community manager would be the perfect devteam member to handle this bug-reporting channel.

[z0ttel]

Not trying to be rude but without dev involvement what is the point?

It's ok - I think if we all would manage to use such a system (feed bugs and related data into the data base), it will be only a matter of time until the devs will start using it (at least as a reference data base) ;)

[jimbop]

It's ok - I think if we all would manage to use such a system (feed bugs and related data into the data base), it will be only a matter of time until the devs will start using it (at least as a reference data base) ;)

Hope so. Anyway, I'd contribute regardless. It should certainly reduce bug reporting duplication on the forum at the very least and would likely be used eventually as you say.

[Tree_UK]

I think its a great idea, but unless the dev's buy into it will be a failure. The community manager is also a good idea that Luthier suggested, but actions speak louder than words and at the moment thats all they are, just words.

[SG1_Lud]

I'd contribute to this idea, zottel.

I stopped reporting two weeks ago because of the apparent lack of interest, feedback and support that the other end is paying to the bug reporting system (despite the efforts of some well known community individuals)

But I love this sim and want to support it, so I guess that "If the mountain won't come to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain" :rolleyes:

[z0ttel]

Thanks for your open-minded responses so far. The idea is not to "force" the developer to use that data base but to provide them a more precise way for checking/tracing the issues we have with this game.
Maybe we get some responses from development side and a broader acceptance within the community if we are able to show some examples as proof of concept?

The big question is where to start? All issue-tracking systems I have used so far require a dedicated server with several other things installed (web server, data base, frontend, ...) which I'm not able to provide :(

Maybe there are experiences within this forum with using web-based project hosting sites which are freely available? Then, an intial set of mandatory data to be delivered which each bug report/feature request will have to be defined. After that we could start to file some reports/requests and see how the responses/overall acceptance is.

@cheyennepilot: I also like this sim a lot and hope this will help to improve the situation

[SG1_Lud]

Last try of what you're trying to achieve was this.
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=23235&highlight=bug+reporting

[Thee_oddball]

i get up every morning get the coffee going and make my breakfast...so for a half hour every morning i come here and read....thats what the whole dev team should be doing.

S!