Family Historian User Group

The Family Historian Support Ticket Sytem introduced a couple of years ago is a handy feature.
It even includes legacy tickets that were created by Email before it was introduced, so has an extensive historical archive.
You can lookup your tickets via the Check Ticket Status tab if you know its Ticket Number.

It provides short term feedback to track progress and provide solutions, or that the problem is logged with the developers.
Unfortunately, that is where the feedback ceases.
If the problem gets fixed in a later release of FH then no feedback appears in the ticket system to say it is fixed.
The list of what's new in a release of FH often just says such as "Fixes a number of minor issues.".
So it is left to owners of the tickets to discover if a problem is fixed by trial and error.

Many other products produce extremely comprehensive release notes including detailed bug fixes.
e.g. IUP Portable User Interface supported by FH has an extensive History of Changes under the headings New and Changed and Fixed, and Ancestral Sources has a detailed Version History of New Features and Problems Fixed in its Help > Introduction - read this first.

Some of these points were discussed in Family Historian V6.2 undocumented features (14723).

The Family Historian Support Ticket Sytem offers an ideal way of reporting exactly what has been fixed to the ticket originators, without necessarily publicising the fixes in the release notes.
Since they reported the problem, the originator is presumably the person most interested in the fix, but if known to be of wider interest through topics in the FHUG then those fixes could be reported in Forums or the Knowledge Base.

What do others think?

Before I retired, I headed up the support group for one of the products of a very large financial services company. Every release was always supported by a complete report of all bugs that were fixed in the release - wherever possible (providing the clients details were not visible), the wording of the original "fault" report was included in the report together with details of what the fix encompassed. This report was made available to every client.

Yes, at times it was a pain to put together but as far as I am concerned, something like this is a "MUST HAVE" for every software product. As a (paying) user, this sort of report is essential I believe as it is quite possible (as I have found to my cost!) that a "fix" actually alters a feature that I use and I could (in fact, did!) waste a lot of time trying to fathom out why something was no longer working in the way I expected.

I acknowledge that genealogy software companies are often small, but given they already have a "bug" report (either internally generated or client generated), it isn't that difficult to put together something that would be useful to all clients.

I am of the opinion that this is a must. It isn't rocket science as if the bug is corrected then surely it is documented internally and it must be easy to pass that information on to us end users.

I am sure a lot of people would also value some feedback on why some bugs which were reported a long time ago (in some cases years ago) are still outstanding despite there having been a number of upgrades since the bug was reported. Just knowing that a bug report has been logged in the system doesn't tell us whether they have looked at it and don't think it is important, or have looked and can't fix it, or haven't yet looked at it.

There appears to be support for improved feedback in the Support Ticket System and/or detailed Release Notes.
So how do we encourage Calico Pie down that road?

Do we go through all our Support Tickets and highlight the lack of feedback and request their status?
( I have dozens of Support Tickets and even the ones that have been fixed don't say so. )

Do we each post Support Tickets requesting detailed Release Notes with each FH version?

Or something else?

I had assumed that the Support Tickets were integrated with the software development management system, so when a problem is fixed the system refers directly to the original Ticket Number, and feedback would be easy. But may be that is not so, and there is a disconnect between Support Tickets and development system, making feedback more difficult.

tatewise wrote:... I had assumed that the Support Tickets were integrated with the software development management system, so when a problem is fixed the system refers directly to the original Ticket Number, and feedback would be easy. But may be that is not so, and there is a disconnect between Support Tickets and development system, making feedback more difficult.

All speculative, but that might very well be the case - perhaps another internal Calico Pie change request system with only a text based reference to the Support Tickets, makes it harder work and if there are only 4 employees (If I Recall Correctly), then all singing, all dancing cross referenced Change Management reports, such as would be found in full size outfits, might not be practical. It was difficult enough for my guys to produce reports about what was in each release of the system, and that was in an environment with full blown Change Request systems, partly because "Management" insisted on us closing the initial incident report once it had been put forward to the software teams.

I just wonder why the Support Ticket System was introduced if it does not integrate with the development system.
What significant features does it offer over the previous Email system?
You could argue that you no longer need to keep the Emails as a record of the support dialogue.
BUT you do need to keep at least the Ticket Numbers otherwise you cannot retrieve the support logs, but numbers on their own don't mean much without at least a Subject Title, and a hyperlink is needed if you want quick access to each log, so you do need to keep some sort of summary list.

Now if the Support Ticket System allowed you to login and review all your submitted tickets, and sort them by date or status or other criteria, then that would be really handy, but it does not.

Also you can only review your own tickets, and cannot even see anyone else's tickets.

I have Mozart Music Notation Software (Like Sibelius but better value in my opinion)

Mozart is a One Man and his Wife operation.

Yet the developer (Dave Weber) takes active part in the support Forum, and when service packs are released he produces a Bug Fix report on his website that lists exactly who reported a fault, How it is fixed, or will note that a fix is too major and will be in the next release.
See http://mozart.co.uk/support/bugfix13.htm for examples from the version I have.

John

That rather begs the question of where are Calico Pie on this forum? I tend to dip in and out over time, but I don’t remember seeing much (anything?) contributed directly by their small team. It could create the impesssion that FH is regarded as a mature product with little active development...

Mark, Calico don't tend to post here, in the very early days Simon posted occasionally. When he did, what tended to happen was he got moaned at for not doing whatever user a or b or c wanted. I ping him an email occasionally if there is something which might need attention or Mike suggests raising a ticket.

There is lot's of active development going on, but they have always held their cards close to their chests as to what that is.