Wednesday 19 March 2014

ColdFusion 11: bug triage (and fixing?) seems to have stalled

G'day:
Ages back I wrote an article "212 untriaged ColdFusion 10 bugs", and indicated my horror at how many bugs in the current version of ColdFusion that Adobe had seen fit to simply ignore. I don't mean "not fix", I meant "just completely ignore; ie: not even acknowledge the bug had been raised".

I followed this up a coupla months later with "Bug watch: 212206 untriaged ColdFusion 10 bugs"; in that two months they had managed to triage a net of six tickets that had been raised.

Just a week later we were down to 165 untriaged bugs: "Good work Adobe ColdFusion Team!", and they had made good progress from there, getting it well below 100 untriaged bugs, and got it down to a low of 40 on Jan 22 this year. Again: good work!

However since then, the tally has been steadily creeping up again. It doesn't look there's much triage activity going on. Now note - I keep repeating this because people seem to be excellent at "not getting it" - I'm only talking untriaged bugs. Bugs that not only have Adobe not fixed (or concluded not to fix, for whatever reason), or are in the process of fixing... these are just ones they haven't bothered to even look at. I am a bit bemused by this, seeing we're in the thick of ColdFusion 11 development. This is the time they should be hammering these issues! I get that they've got a lot of work on, but this is all part of that work. They need to address these issues!

As well as tracking untriaged ColdFusion 10 issues, I am now also tracking CF9 and CF11 ones. With CF9 there was a similar pattern... Adobe hit the outstanding ones hard for a week or two, but then seemed to get bored and stopped doing it. And ColdFusion 11 bugs are just bumbling along, pretty much under control I think. Although - seriously - I'm surprised Adobe aren't looking at these tickets as soon as they come in... given the community are volunteering their time to test @ the moment, it seems a bit disrespectful of Adobe to not keep on top of the ColdFusion 11 bugs as soon as they come in. There's only just shy of a dozen untriaged ones right now, but that's not changing much. And there aren't that many CF11 bugs coming in that these dozen represent new ones coming in every day: they're the same old ones sitting there being ignored.

Not good.

Anyway, here's some charts showing the progress of the triage. On the whole it's good because CF9 and CF10 are tending towards fewer outstanding bugs, and ColdFusion 11 whilst increasing is not increasing too much.

That said, I dunno how much testing it's getting... every time I look at ColdFusion 11 I can pretty much instantly find a bug of some description, so I would have thought any other testers would also. I am not testing it currently, due to workload from other directions occupying my attention.

The figures contributing to the charts come from a daily scrape of the bugbase, doing a search for "Open" / "Unverified" tickets there are on a given day. It's the same info I update @cfmlnotifier with.

Make of that lot what you will.

--
Adam