Blog Entry

Spent an interesting (and exhausting) weekend starting the process of pulling together the list of fixes for ZENworks 7 Support Pack 1, so we can publish them. For example TID3484245 is the result of working from about 5am to 3pm both days (I know what you're thinking, why can't he be more efficient? ).

Well the truth is, that although Novell does have a good system for tracking bugs (Bugzilla), not every bug gets a TID written when it needs one. It's very easy when you're dealing with a problem for one customer: you raise a bug for their issue, and when it gets fixed, they're happy, and you move on to the next problem - I've done it myself, though I try not to. What we need to get better at, is deciding whether other customers would benefit from knowing about the problem and the fix. Now that we have a new system for letting customers know about hotpatches, it's more important than ever that we raise TIDs earlier in the process. What's needed at this point is to go back to the engineers who raised the bug reports, and persuade them that writing a TID for an old problem is as important as trying to fix a problem for the customer that's screaming now!

I know that many customers need these lists, to be able to show their boss that the issue they're experiencing will be fixed by the patch: Novell encourages customers to upgrade to Support Packs (after all it's free, isn't it?) but if you've worked in a large corporation, you know that free doesn't mean no cost - there's the testing cycle, the paperwork, the pilot, the rollout, and the assumption from your end users that anything that goes wrong from that point on is because you did the upgrade. You're in trouble if the weather turns bad after your upgrade, because that'll be your fault too!

I'll post updates here as these lists get updated, to give you a feel for how the process is going. I'd be very interested in any comments you may have on the good or bad points regarding this process, or TIDs in general.

July 17 - added a bunch more TIDs today, deleted a couple of duplicates (hey, maybe we fixed the problem twice? ). I'll be adding more tomorrow, then I'll start chasing the recalcitrants...