[sldev] sljirastats.com Linden Metrics Report

Ryan Williams (Which) rdw at lindenlab.com
Wed Apr 16 15:37:08 PDT 2008


Mike Monkowski wrote:
> Rob Lanphier wrote:
>>> SVC-472 and SVC-85 remain the most hated bugs, for most of the time that
>>> sljirastats has existed.  
>>
>> Hmmm....these are also somewhat subjective without clear victory
>> conditions.  While I'm guessing the team will acknowledge that these
>> aren't yet running at an acceptable baseline, it also strikes me that
>> these both describe symptoms with multiple and ever-changing causes of
>> failure that will probably always be with us in some form from time to
>> time.  For both of these, I think we need to establish a victory
>> condition that causes these issues to be closed and stay closed, to
>> the point where a new issue gets opened if a problem with the same
>> symptom occurs.  Otherwise, these will automatically be at the top of
>> the list every time they get reopened, despite the fact that other
>> issues may actually be more pressing.
>>
>> What are good victory conditions for these?
> 
> Well, I read through SVC-85 and at no point did it appear to be even
> temporarily fixed.  Usually after a Linden comment saying that "we think
> we fixed it" there was a response from the residents that "no, you
> didn't."  A good victory condition would be a response the next day that
> said "yes, it works now."  The friends list is either there or it's not.
>  What is subjective about that?

For a start, it would be nice to split it into multiple bugs:
  - friends list shows (waiting) instead of friend name
  - friends list reports friend as offline who is actually online, or
vice versa
  - blue notifications don't always pop up when friend goes online/offline

I guess one could declare victory if they always worked for all
observers.  But it can be quite subjective to determine if your friend
is online or not.  Strangers could have confusingly similar names or
avatars to your friends, there could be ghosts in the IM system, they
could be "online" as far as the sim is concerned but their viewer just
crashed, someone else could have their password and is logging in as
them without their knowledge.... there's lots of cases where one could
be confused enough to think the friends list is broken.  Some of those
have happened to me.  So, having a victory condition of "nobody thinks
its broken" seems like it would never be closed.

Also, having broadly-worded bugs means that everything that is even
tangentially related to the bug can keep it open.  Let's say we fix the
three parts of the bug and everyone agrees that they're fixed.  Then the
viewer gets a bug that occasionally fails to render friends in the
friends list.  This would be a completely different bug, and would
require a completely different team to resolve, but SVC-85 is worded so
broadly that it would be reopened and we'd waste days trying to debug
the service side of things before realizing that it was a new bug in the
viewer.

So, yeah, that's what goes through my head when I think of that bug.  I
think we should close it in favor of a cluster of more specific bugs,
but then there would be outcry that we unjustly crushed all the votes on
SVC-85.

-RYaN


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