Sneaky machinations on the issue tracker

[Attila-Mihaly Balazs]

So, apparently in addition to all the problems with the new issue tracker (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/google-appengine/issue$20tracker%7Csort:relevance/google-appengine/KxcrVBTOcww/htcHKy4yBAAJ) it is also being used to sneaky unleash some bots unto the issue which automatically close them claiming that they are "Not Reproducible". This after being given enough details that they can track down the failure in the system (and they need to track down the failure, since it's happening in the Google infrastructure where we the clients have no access to).

Again, the new issue tracker is a disaster from the customers perspective since the "internal" team members give wrong information (so they either don't know or don't care to actually try out whatever they're suggesting) and then there is the bot-army auto-closing issues with frivolous reasons just to satisfy the management (look, we closed X issues!).

Google: some of us work in very small teams and don't have the time to repeatedly create proof-of-concept projects to show that the information given by your employees is false. That's why you have 10s of thousands of technical people and that's why we're *paying* you to host our applications. I'm trying to be there for my sick kid in the hospital, not to have to argue with the employees repeatedly so that we can have our issue (which is affecting our customers) looked at in a timely manner!

Example: https://issuetracker.google.com/u/1/issues/38046584

[Attila-Mihaly Balazs]

So, yes, we basically need to find an ex-googler "consultant" who still has relations with people working at the company to get the issues looked at / fixed.

[Jesse Scherer (Google Cloud Support)]

Hello again Attila,

 

First off, I want to apologize. We did a bad job on the issue report you cite. It's already reopened and we're taking another look. Should something like this happen again in the future, posting here is a fine way to get us to take another look at an issue. Moreover, if we're giving incorrect information, we need to know, so that we can fix it.

 

That said, I want to assure you that we do not have bots closing issues. In this, case we closed the issue because we hadn't heard from you for a week, and at the time we thought we still needed more info from you.

 

Next, when it comes to reviewing new issues, I'm "the management," so I can be pretty confident in saying we do not encourage our staff to close issues: rather, we encourage them to triage them.

 

We offer the issue tracker because you shouldn't have to pay for support to report bugs, just like we offer several Google Groups because you shouldn't have to pay for general advice and discussion. Investigating possible new bugs, providing general advice, and answering questions on Stack Overflow -- these three channels are handled by the same team within Support -- scale to benefit all of our customers, so we can justify doing it for free, with a fixed-size team. But I'd be doing you a terrible disservice to pretend that we can provide SLAs (service level agreements, including guarantees on response time) on any of these one-to-many forums. If you need SLAs on support issues, check out this page and appropriate links from it.

 

Regards,

Jesse Scherer

Technical Program Manager, Google Cloud Platform