[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] discouraged

[Diane Disbro]

Good morning -

I appreciate hearing from several communities members their frustrations
and suggestions for using the web client.

Showstoppers for me are:

   - The inability to edit item attributes in the copy editor of more than
   one item at a time.
   - Losing settings and workstation registration after clearing the
   browser cache or restarting the computer.
   - The frequent need to clear the browser cache because of system freeze.
   - Several functions require being applied twice before the the function
   is performed.
   - Dymo printers aren't compatible with the web client.

I chose the top five from my list of thirty-six.

Thank you.

Diane Disbro
Branch Manager/Circulation Coordinator
Union Branch
Scenic Regional Library
308 Hawthorne Drive
Union, MO     63084
(636) 583-3224

On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 3:08 PM, Kathy Lussier <klussier at masslnc.org> wrote:

> 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
> <https://maps.google.com/?q=308+Hawthorne+Drive+%0D%0A+++++++++++++++++++++++++Union,+MO+%C2%A0+%C2%A0+63084&entry=gmail&source=g>
> Union, MO     63084
> <https://maps.google.com/?q=308+Hawthorne+Drive+%0D%0A+++++++++++++++++++++++++Union,+MO+%C2%A0+%C2%A0+63084&entry=gmail&source=g>
> (636) 583-3224
>
>
> --
> Kathy Lussier
> Project Coordinator
> Massachusetts Library Network Cooperative(508) 343-0128klussier at masslnc.org
> Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/kmlussier
>
>
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