First, let me say that, in general, I'm quite happy with my NetAdvantage products and the responsiveness of the people at Infragistics. Your's were the best controls (for what I wanted anyway) that I could find when I tested a bunch of different UI products.
I've just spent the first 3 (Three) hours of my morning doing nothing but debugging and documenting for Infragistics some additional information regarding a current bug issue that I found and reported in the first place. Discovering and working around this particular bug has taken most of my time for the previous couple of days. Another bug I discovered and reported which is also now in the Infragistic bug Case todo list, took me a couple hours to diagnose and report.
I bill my time at over $100/hour, which I realize is not terribly extravagant as programming goes, but, it still adds up after a coupl'a days... I personally, have a hard time billing my customers for time that was spent on finding, diagnosing, and working around bugs in the software that "I" purchased and use. On the other hand, I suspect Infragistics probably isn't going to pay me my normal billing rate for finding, diagnosing, and reporting thier bugs to them... even tho they probably should.
So I was thinking... Infragistics should start giving us a credit for each legitimate bug we find, diagnose, and report. The credit would go against the purchase of New Products or our next Annual Maintenance Fee, or whatever you call that charge. I don't know what a fair price per bug would be, but I do know that working as one of Infragistics Testing and Quality Control people for FREE after paying over $1,000 to purchase the products in the first place, (while it's a helluva deal for Infragistics) ain't quite right...
$50 bucks per bug? Whad'ya think?
By the way, the "Email me replies to this post" doesn't work for me. I never get emailed the replies. Does it work for anyone else?
Wolven,
I totally agree with you.So do I founded, and resolved, Infragistics Bugs and spent a lot of time to discover it and to try to transofrm my SupportRequest in a BugCase bug with the "first-line" Support Engenieer (but this guys have nevere written an applications or written only examples?), even I told the line number of their source code and the relative correction XD .
The pepople at Infragsitcs do their work good, but they dont write real applications and of course they dont crash with a real deep use of their superb abstractions (NetAdavantage).
I support your suggestion to "win" a copules of bucks for any real bug discovered and use them like a discount coupon to buy from Infragstics. I also think that if the CEO of Infragistics follow your suggestion he do a great thing.We wait any reply from Infragistics.
Ciao.
Davide Dolla.
Hi Guys,
First, let me say that I am sorry about the issues. It is not fun to spend time on a problem only to realize there was nothing you could do about it in the first place because of a bug in our software. I can't commit to anything around a bug-swap right now, but I can start a discussion here at Infragistics on the frustrations you guys have had and where we can do better.
One of the drivers to shift from 3 releases a year to 2 releases a year was to give us back a lot of the time we spent prepping releases so we could do more around quality assurance. This change in our engineering process also allowed us to release CTP’s at a more regular schedule. Our goal around the CTP releases is to give you time to look at what we are doing and to give us feedback around scenarios that we might be missing before we release.
I realize that everybody does not have time to experiment with CTP releases, but any feedback (good and bad) we can get is positive for the product. In fact, as much specific feedback we can get on the scenarios your are using for the controls gives us the opportunity to test those scenarios before the product gets released. So don’t be shy on telling us where you want us to spend more time even if you aren’t using any of the CTP’s.
This might not be the perfect answer that you wanted, but improving the quality in our software, documentation, and technical support is our main focus. I’ll also take a look at the bugs you guys reported and see what is going on with them as well and let you know the deal there.Please keep me posted on any other issues you are having as well,
Thanks
Jason
Jason, thanks for your reply. I agree with you and I understand your-side problems.
I'm just loose the text typed for this post for an erroneus click on Back button of mouse GRRRRR, so I will be concise.
I my last support request (realy one bug report, but the choiche there is not in New Spport request Form) I spend a LOT of time to convince the "first-line" support engineers (CAS-18727-KJNGHK) that was a bug and not mine! (12 emails and 13 days!!!).
I suggest to create a group of your customers (like Silver-Gold Partener) that help you, and they, to try CPT, do bug reporting and can suggest, better than other, new features/refine.In exchange Infragistics may offer discounts, or free, on it products/services.In this scenario Infragistics will "hire" a lot of high professional developers, with experencie in "real world" software, with quit nothing. In addition an NDA signed from Infragistics and their Gold Partner will open a new way of interactivity with your customer because they will send to you their projects in sources without probems. (now I cannot send you any source code, because we have made a own framework and all applications are based on this framwork)
Another idea is to create an new area on Forums, higly moderated, where we can post/discuss new feature pre-request (i read a comment about similar idea in a blog) or discuss a bug before submit it to your support.
Team working is the right way to the success!
PS: My hope is that Infragistics has not become so big to lose its head, as always happens when companies become too large and the decisions will made only by marketing/CFO.
I just want to add my vote for this... I have no idea how many bugs I have reported to Infragistics over the years, but most of them have been disruptive. The time I have taken to well document the bug and provide sample code is time I ought to really be spending on adding new features to my application, and is value lost to my company.
I know that there is no way that Infragistics would ever "pay" us for our time helping with bugs, but a small token of appreciation would be nice. Whether it be a credit toward future purchases, credit toward training, or membership in a VIP forum... something.
Time spent documenting and reporting bugs is time spent developing your application, not ours.
By the way, I just upgraded our subscriptions to Ultimate for my team, and I am psyched about what you guys are doing for mobile! I would love to see a navigation control that changes layout based on screen size, so you can use one control for phone, tablet, and PC. A good example of this is the top menu bar on www.microsoft.com.
Just bumping this conversation up so Infragistics doesn't lose track of it.