About that bug report/feature request blog post…
Posted: Sun Apr 19, 2015 8:00 pm
OK, I feel like I’m at least part of the reason for the lengthy blog post at http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/2015/04/To ... one-right/ since this came up shortly after having a discussion about exactly this on IRC, and I’m afraid I’m on calguy1000’s ignore list already because he dismissed several of my reports/requests lately. So, here I am now and would appreciate if you took the time to read this.
I see where calguy1000 (and Anne and all the other people) is coming from but would like to add that the tone makes the music – on both sides, of course. And I have the feeling the tone of the developers responding to requests/reports could be improved a lot. I understand that programmers/IT people usually aren’t known to be particularly eloquent or empathetic in general and I also understand that they probably get really annoying requests at times but in any case the response should be more than a closed ticket with an automatic “Won’t fix” or “Invalid” label. You wouldn’t know what people in other customer support fields have to deal with on a daily basis, and yet, they still have to be friendly in order to not frighten away the customers (because that’s hurting business).
Let me recapitulate: I wrote a feature request on the CGSmartImage module’s project page where I simply asked for support of HTML5 data-attributes on the generated images using the {CGSmartImage} tag. The request was dismissed as invalid without any explanation. Asking on IRC why this request is considered invalid I got the “What’s the difference between the green and the red one?” analogy and people – not understanding how I couldn’t possibly know why it was invalid – telling me I provided too little information.
Now, here’s the thing: I consider myself a person with some common sense, and while not a real programmer (“just” a front-end developer) I try in all conscience to be as friendly and elaborate in my requests as possible. I’m just a human, however, and I’m not perfect, although constantly trying to get better, so sometimes I do make mistakes (and sometimes unknowingly). But it doesn’t help me to get better with future requests if my question/request just gets rejected without explanation. It might be convenient for the annoyed developer but overall it’s counterproductive.
I still don’t understand how a request for a feature needs a big explanation, though. After all, that’s what FRs are there for: you ask for something that doesn’t exist yet. How this is supposed to be implemented is the developer’s problem, not the problem of the person requesting. And if it’s impossible to implement or the developer doesn’t feel like implementing it at all then where’s the problem of returning exactly this as explanation for closing the ticket? And don’t put me in the “cry-murder camp” because I’m requesting an explanation about this subject. I’m not taking anything personal, I would really just like to understand, to learn, to improve. What did I do wrong and how can I do better next time?
Believe me, I’m not trying to be a dick that demands solutions served on a silver plate. But people not responding at all or responding with automatic rejections does somewhat come across as being a dick.
At least you could employ automatic replies that are a tiny little bit more elaborate such as: “Need more information”, “Too complicated to implement without much effort”, “Duplicate of …”, or “Ain’t nobody got time for that”
Thanks for your attention (if you’ve made it through here).
I see where calguy1000 (and Anne and all the other people) is coming from but would like to add that the tone makes the music – on both sides, of course. And I have the feeling the tone of the developers responding to requests/reports could be improved a lot. I understand that programmers/IT people usually aren’t known to be particularly eloquent or empathetic in general and I also understand that they probably get really annoying requests at times but in any case the response should be more than a closed ticket with an automatic “Won’t fix” or “Invalid” label. You wouldn’t know what people in other customer support fields have to deal with on a daily basis, and yet, they still have to be friendly in order to not frighten away the customers (because that’s hurting business).
Let me recapitulate: I wrote a feature request on the CGSmartImage module’s project page where I simply asked for support of HTML5 data-attributes on the generated images using the {CGSmartImage} tag. The request was dismissed as invalid without any explanation. Asking on IRC why this request is considered invalid I got the “What’s the difference between the green and the red one?” analogy and people – not understanding how I couldn’t possibly know why it was invalid – telling me I provided too little information.
Now, here’s the thing: I consider myself a person with some common sense, and while not a real programmer (“just” a front-end developer) I try in all conscience to be as friendly and elaborate in my requests as possible. I’m just a human, however, and I’m not perfect, although constantly trying to get better, so sometimes I do make mistakes (and sometimes unknowingly). But it doesn’t help me to get better with future requests if my question/request just gets rejected without explanation. It might be convenient for the annoyed developer but overall it’s counterproductive.
I still don’t understand how a request for a feature needs a big explanation, though. After all, that’s what FRs are there for: you ask for something that doesn’t exist yet. How this is supposed to be implemented is the developer’s problem, not the problem of the person requesting. And if it’s impossible to implement or the developer doesn’t feel like implementing it at all then where’s the problem of returning exactly this as explanation for closing the ticket? And don’t put me in the “cry-murder camp” because I’m requesting an explanation about this subject. I’m not taking anything personal, I would really just like to understand, to learn, to improve. What did I do wrong and how can I do better next time?
Believe me, I’m not trying to be a dick that demands solutions served on a silver plate. But people not responding at all or responding with automatic rejections does somewhat come across as being a dick.
At least you could employ automatic replies that are a tiny little bit more elaborate such as: “Need more information”, “Too complicated to implement without much effort”, “Duplicate of …”, or “Ain’t nobody got time for that”
Thanks for your attention (if you’ve made it through here).