[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] discouraged

[Kathy Lussier]

Hi Diane,

I'm sorry to hear your frustration, but I can also empathize. While 
working on a recent project to sponsor more bug fixes for the web 
client, I also got discouraged as new bugs were reported, particularly 
when they were ones that would have made our priority list if we had 
known about them at the time we were selecting bugs to fix. To keep 
myself from getting discouraged, I found it helped to keep some things 
in mind.

- Despite the current open bugs, the web client has come a long way just 
in the past year. Setting aside the addition of serials and offline, 
there has been a lot of bug fixing  over the last months. In many cases, 
the fixes have been for what I consider to be showstopper bugs. I 
continued to see this work even today  as I was going through my bug 
mail. It might be useful for the community to track statistics of how 
many web client bugs are getting fixed on a monthly basis to help us see 
the progress that's been done. Looking at the 3.0 point release notes is 
also a good way to see how much work has been done.

- There were many people, including myself, who spent a lot of time 
testing the web client when the code was initially written, but, no 
matter how much testing was done, we knew that there are just some bugs 
that just won't be found until people start using it in production. This 
isn't unique to Evergreen or open-source software, but is something I've 
seen when using proprietary software as well. We tried to catch some of 
these bugs by having 2.12 available for trial use in production, but I 
don't think most sites really started using the web client heavily  
until 3.0, which was just released in October. I would say the flurry of 
bug reporting since that time is an expected part of the process of 
eventually getting to a more stable web client. This is also why we are 
keeping the xul client around through the 3.1 release, because we knew 
it would take time to get the web client to where it needs to be for all 
Evergreen users to move to it.

I still remember the early days of the Template Toolkit catalog. I was 
equally discouraged about bugs and missing features, but as more sites 
started using it, they made sure features important to them were fixed 
or added, and we now have a stable and feature rich public catalog.

- I'm worried about stating this the wrong way, but we also have to 
remember the number of bugs we've learned to live with under the xul 
client. I'm not saying we should just learn to live with the web client 
bugs, but they certainly are more noticeable now because they are new. 
There are also several xul client bugs we were able to close out because 
they were fixed in the web client. The important thing is that the bugs 
are open and known. Evergreen sites can see where the problems are and 
ultimately choose to focus on addressing the ones most important to them.

Having said all of this, I do think it's important that if there are 
showstopper bugs in the web client (not annoyances, but things that 
really prevent you from using the web client), we need to identify those 
to increase the likelihood that they will be fixed ahead of other bugs. 
For example, one of the groups I work with recently set the bug priority 
to High for a handful of bugs they considered to be showstoppers. Back 
in the Template Toolkit days, there was a tag we used in Launchpad that 
identified bugs we thought should be fixed before removing the old 
catalog from Evergreen. Maybe we could consider doing something similar 
for the web client.

Kathy



On 03/16/2018 03:27 PM, Diane Disbro wrote:
> Good afternoon -
>
> I volunteered to keep track of Webby problems for the Missouri 
> Evergreen circulation committee. I am pretty discouraged. My library 
> began using Webby in December but there were so many frustrations that 
> we stopped after about a month. My spreadsheet of problems now has 
> thirty-five issue on it. Every time a new bug report is sent out my 
> heart sinks.
>  Diane Disbro
> Branch Manager/Circulation Coordinator
> Union Branch
> Scenic Regional Library
> 308 Hawthorne Drive
> Union, MO     63084
> (636) 583-3224

-- 
Kathy Lussier
Project Coordinator
Massachusetts Library Network Cooperative
(508) 343-0128
klussier at masslnc.org
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/kmlussier

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