A public facing or login required bug tracking and feature requests system.
If we had this 6 months ago we would all be alot further forward by now.
I have reported more bugs than I can remember or likely can even find some of them again in the forum threads somewhere? and I’ve suggested many feature requests.
I have no idea if any of them are being tracked or resolved or if my feature requests have been taken in to consideration and moved on to the next stage of implementation?
Everything coming in, bug or feature request gets recorded in our internal systems. We have been working on how to expose that. Gabriel is leading that initiative and he can chime in.
I don’t know how many bugs I have personally reported in the forums? At least 50 or probably more at a guess.
Who knows? I’ve forgotten and they have been buried in the forum threads.
Will it be read only? or will we be able to directly submit bugs into the system and provide additional feedback?
I would have to re-read all my posts in the forum, which there are many and try to find and list all the bugs I reported, probably a week to do that and then compare my list to your list in the system.
Are forum users usernames noted in the bugs on your internal system? So you know who reported the bug?
Gabi OK this is good news and a step in the right direction, but it should of been done months ago.
Perhaps a bug tracking system such as this will help to retain some of the 3rd party Devs that have expressed their concerns and for those forum users who are beta testing and their enthusiasm may have waned due to lack of knowing if their feedback was really picked up or not?
A robust, all-inclusive Wiki containing full documentation for each controller, device, feature, etc. I believe this has been done already, but if you held a gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you where to find it. (I suppose this page comes closest? Yet it doesn’t even link to the Forum!)
I think this, combined with the above suggestions, points to the overall impression of ezlo’s ecosystem being entirely too scattershot at present. It needs to be much more cohesive for newcomers to make any sense of things. (The Forum itself at least has decent structure, but for n00bs it still might look like deep, murky waters.)
Go sign up as a smartthings developer. See what they have.
Figure out what you need to do to lure developers away.
I picked SmartThings because they are not beloved by developers. I don’t know who is the best ecosystem for developers, but I am pretty sure it isn’t ST. Beating ST at developer support may be more than ezlo can manage, but it doesn’t set you up for crushing failure and has a possibility of some success.
With ST changing their language and api, they are going to disenfranchise a lot of their classic devs but also a lot of new devs will see an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a large, hungry market.
If your environment is better, you may pick up some skilled devs. If not, you are going to be limited to people who wander into ezlo more or less by accident.
But never, ever forget that no matter how crappy their tools are or how many hoops developers have to hump through that part and parcel of “what they have” includes a global install base that’s probably two orders of magnitude bigger than vera’s ever was, copious agreements with other manufacturers, board-level involvement on multiple foundational technology special interest groups, direct product integration support from their appliance, home electronics, and smartphone divisions and indirect support from their heavy equipment and electronic fab divisions that help subsidize other Samsung ventures.
First of all thank you for all of your feedback and support.
As it was already pointed out, these items are not new and they’re standard tools provided provided by use in part with the old platform or provided by our competitors, so all of the items below are part of our roadmap and are today in different stages of our process.
Please see below more details per specific request:
“Bug Tracking”
“Public feature request system”
“Dedicated developer relations”
“A robust, all-inclusive Wiki containing full documentation for each controller, device, feature, etc.”
We are trying to solve for all of these requests with tools that are interlinked and are updated in real time based on out put from our internal tools. We analysed and tested several tools
and we are leaning towards Service Desk from the Atlassian suite. This will allow us to track different types of arequests as well as search through documentation or roadmaps posted in a Confluence workspace.
One of the small setbacks of using this tool is that the users will have access to their own tickets rather than seeing all tickets posted by all users. We’re working on solution for this.
An app store for publishing and installing plugins.
I think it’s safe to say that the appstore we have for the old platform is severly outdated so the plan is to invest a lot of time in building a whole new app store with a lot of new features we’re missing today.
We will soon get started on this initiative and will be able to provide at leas a high level estimate of when this will be available.
Public plugin architecture road map
Development roadmap
We will include in the Confluence workspace a high level version of the roadmap, so users can check it before submitting a new feature request.
Talk? they are not using skype to “talk”…they are using it to “type”…can she type fast? (a chat app is a chat app…you type the other side sees…) Are you saying When you type in skype other party can’t see or type back?
Unless your Skype is set up different from my Skype, it doesn’t provide a permanent history of conversations accessible to anyone later, preventing he-said/she-said debates.
That permanence is important when a feature is 3 or 4 sprints back. MS Teams has history but I doubt you are adding external devs to your Teams, so they don’t have that record.
We use slack for durable chat with people outside the dev group (product owners, SMEs, etc). Then when something useful comes out of the discussion it can get moved to the dev group’s internal docs AND the original discussion is preserved where all current and future participants can access it.
Discord would be another, probably less expensive, option.
Exactly the point…you use these kind of tools for realtime communication then take that output and push it internally to Jira or Confluence etc. So the value of skype in the above example as a tool to facilitate realtime communication which then results in internal documents to be created. Ideally internal documents created (with proper ticket numbers etc) would encompass all the discussion therefore historical storage is provided by the internal systems.
And that is what Gabriel said when he mentioned giving access to these…
My point is that impermanent realtime communication is a variant of the telephone. We (modern business) don’t rely on telephone calls alone. That conversation held in real-time is only valuable if it is accurately captured.
The process is calls result in written minutes which are distributed to the attendees and signed off on as accurate. If you don’t have those last two steps, its back to he-said/she-said.
Our ticket system is the start of the process. 'User X needs a thing that does Y." There is a conversation with the user that is captured in the ticket, which the user can see. If the user disagrees with the request as captured, they can document the disputed items in the ticket, which one would hope get addressed prior to scheduling.
There are developer only steps that the user can’t see, but they can tell the tickets status, which usually has a predicted implementation date and/or describes blockers.
Depending on the request, the user may be required to do UAT or provide test cases for validation prior to production deployment.
Release notes will reference the oroginal request ticket when it is deployed.
I have seen some variant of this process as the norm over the past 30yrs.
In my construction engineering days “tickets” were known as “change orders” but its all request tracking, documentation, implementation, and validation.
and then compare my list to your list in the system.