Now, working in both a development and support function, I can appreciate that everyone is busy and that trying to debug faults in my application isn't the job of support. However, I do get a little tired of the support process going like this:
But it's the next request that often follows - "Please supply example project" that is sometimes irksome. It's going to take me several hours to try and and build a sample standalone project and at the end of that, it's not guaranteed I'll be able to reproduce the fault. It could be that it only happens in a very specific situation that a sample project can never reproduce. I once had to resort to sending you a complete VM so you could see the fault as when stripped down to basics, it didn't happen. It turned out in that case to be a localisation bug.
In situations like this, it would be preferable to discuss the problem conceptually with the developer. Wearing my development hat, the support people here often go "Can you think of any reason why XYZ should happen?". As I know the code and they don't, it's often very easy for me to glance down the code and go "Ahh, yes - that could happen if XYZ".
So the plea is to not always bounce the support call straight back at me. I'm not in the habit of making up issues just for the hell of it :-)
Cheers, Rob,
PS. The DELETE key doesn't work in this editor. Backspace is fine.
Just come across this post, and I have exactly the same feelings about Infragistics support. It's by far the worst support process of any company that we deal with, just in terms of the amount of work that we, the customer, are expected to do to identify problems in Infragistics' code.
The dreaded response - "please supply an example which exhibits the bug" - is used in almost every support issue, no matter how detailed the original description. There seems to be a culture of getting the customer to do as much of the work as possible. I have provided stack traces (CAS-15095-G67VE4) and even diffs in the Infragistics code to show what has changed to cause a bug (CAS-22718-AHSCBM) but it is never enough for the support engineers to begin investigating with. In the latter case, the first response was "you're not using the latest patch - try again with this". In fact, the issue had not been fixed in the latest patch, and it was just another standard response.
I have e-mailed the support manager about certain problems in the past but nothing ever changes. I totally agree that there should be some discussion of problems with a developer to see if, with the help of the code, they can imagine why a bug might happen before asking the customer to spend hours isolating the problem for them.
The support engineers' workload will not be helped by the decreasing quality of recent releases. We use the WinForms product, and more and more bugs are introduced with each release. These are reported and fixed, but the next release introduces different problems. The initial WinForms 2009.1 release has to be the worst yet. As a developer I realise that bugs are inevitable, but you used to manage to add new features without compromising on the overall quality. Something has changed.
Cheers,Jon
>The dreaded response - "please supply an example which exhibits the bug" - is used in almost every support issue, no matter how detailed the original description.
Yes, I get the same. Actually, there have been a couple of instances where the bug was so obvious that one gets back "I have reproduced the problem".
>There seems to be a culture of getting the customer to do as much of the work as possible.
Certainly is and like mugs we do it :-) I've just done their job for them and reduced the bug with IE8 down to six lines of code. I hope that's enough for them to repeat it! I'm just about to upload it except I can't as the support requests system is broken.
What annoys me is that it's NOT a server side issue. Whether the problem is reproducable with these six lines or the 500 lines I'd reduced the original zillion line system down to was complete moot. It's a JavaScript problem.
>I have e-mailed the support manager about certain problems in the past but nothing ever changes. I totally agree that there should be some discussion of problems with a developer to see if, with the help of the code, they can imagine why a bug might happen before asking the customer to spend hours isolating the problem for them.
I had "I'm sorry we'll look into it" holding pattern. I'm actively looking at alternative control suites esp. for the grid.
>The support engineers' workload will not be helped by the decreasing quality of recent releases. We use the WinForms product, and more and more bugs are introduced with each release. These are reported and fixed, but the next release introduces different problems.
Same experience here. Each release I expect more to break than be fixed. It's not a good situation to be in. I recently filled in the survey and when asked "Would you recommend NetAdvantage?" - well let's say laughing is good for you.
>The initial WinForms 2009.1 release has to be the worst yet. As a developer I realise that bugs are inevitable, but you used to manage to add new features without compromising on the overall quality. Something has changed.
I hope, prey, wish that developement hasn't been outsourced. If so, bye bye...
Cheers, Rob.
> Come on - not supporting PNG!
Yep, but zip files are fine so zip the PNG and it will get through (but none of this is documented or reported in any error messages).
> over 763 users joined in the last week
I think you've hit the nail on the head there. It seems to me that they've grown too big to cope, which has led to poor support, and so many bugs being introduced as they hack in random features requested by their ever-increasing customer base. They really need to stop and think about the effect this is having on their existing, long-term customers, and how all these features affect the performance of their flagship products such as the grid.
jsenior said: > So did I. Let's hope they read them.
> So did I. Let's hope they read them.
According to this forum, over 763 users joined in the last week. I can't believe there isn' t more pressure to improve support & quality.
>presumably unsupported file formats, like PNG images -
Ahh that explains why I got back "I couldn't see any attachment" because I sent a PNG screenshot. Come on - not supporting PNG! I though file uploaders just uploaded binary files and didn't care about the contents.
> the support requests system is broken
That doesn't surprise me. Unfortunately I've had far too much experience of its problems. It frequently drops attachments without reporting why (presumably unsupported file formats, like PNG images - seriously), which prompts a confused response to my references to "the attached file". For all Infragistics' claims about making great user experiences, the support system has to be a very poor example. It's ridiculously slow and has basic usability issues like the box for adding a reply covering up the thread so far.
> I recently filled in the survey
So did I. Let's hope they read them.