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2420
A gripe about support and sample projects
posted

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:

  1. Either upgrade to newer version of NetAdvantage or upgrade some other component (IE8 in this case)
  2. Something that's worked perfectly for years breaks in a non-trivial part of the application
  3. Raise support call and describe fault
  4. Support says "I've tried it and it works" - not surprising as often the fault is not trivial and occurs deep within the application

 

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.

Parents
  • 290
    posted

    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

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