Update about the App Engine issues tracker

62 views
Skip to first unread message

Ikai Lan (Google)

unread,
Jan 12, 2011, 6:50:46 PM1/12/11
to Google App Engine
Hey everyone,

Most if not all of you should be aware of the App Engine issues tracker:


Looking back at 2010, we realized that we really could have been doing a much better job managing the issues in the tracker. We were asking users to post issues to the tracker with every intention of revisiting the issues, but something more important always surfaced, and the number of issues grew to a near unmanageable number. 

Going forward, this will change. We've come up with a plan to get the issues tracker under control:

1. We will be going through the backlog and categorizing issues. We'll either be marking them as "Defect" or "Feature Request" as appropriate. We'll also be attaching "Components" to the labels. This will allow us to have visibility into which features have the most outstanding bugs and assign them to the correct engineering owners, potentially shifting resources if needed. We've gotten through most of the issues, but there are still several hundred that need to be categorized. 

2. We'll have an internal dashboard that will show us the status of all outstanding issues that we'll track in our weekly meeting. Our weekly meeting tracks various metrics such as performance, usage, and so forth. Product leadership is committed to making this a very high priority in 2011.

3. More releases will likely be bugfix only releases. Bugfix releases are never exciting (just like accounting), but they have to do done. This will allow us to focus on bug fixes instead of feature pushes.

Our goal for this month is to have 100% of all existing issues in the issues tracker categorized, and all new issues categorized within a week.


How you can help
--------------------------

1. Check for a duplicate first. If so, star that issue. We often do sorts by number of stars, so if it's a common issue, lots of duplicates can cause us to miss it

2. Write a clear, concise bug report. This is a report that needs to be read several times. Write very clearly reproduction steps, OS, SDK version and post code if you can. If we can't understand the bug report, we will close it. 

3. Follow up. We will sometimes post questions in the bug. If we don't receive a response, we will close the bug. Also - if it turns out to be user error, it helps us a lot if you post your fix. This sometimes helps us expose places where we can improve our documentation.


Q & A
---------

Q: What will be done with the issues that are marked as features?
A: We'll look at these when we plan roadmaps, but we are currently prioritizing features.

Q: My issue is N months old. How come it takes so long to receive a response?
A: Well, it's now or never. If we don't take action now, it's more likely your issue would have been lost in the annals of bug history.

Q: You marked my bug as a Feature even though it is clearly a Defect!
A: We'll be doing this on a case by case basis using our best judgment. Sometimes, we may mark it as a feature because, to us, fixing the issue requires a new Feature to be implemented. The lack of SSL support for custom domains, for instance, may seem like a product deficiency. And you're right: it is. But in terms of the code that's out there, it's not a defect at all, but something which requires new code to be written to be supported.

Q: I submitted a 3 line patch. Why can't this just be merged in?
A: Unfortunately, there are no such things as 3 line patches. Each patch must be merged, have a corresponding test and pass our regressions tests. Then - we need to test the combination of all the patches. As codebases grow, the chances of something not having an effect on anything else becomes smaller and smaller.

Hope this update helps.

--
Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine

风笑雪

unread,
Jan 13, 2011, 2:31:21 AM1/13/11
to google-a...@googlegroups.com
Hi Ikai,

I'm glad to see this change.

Some issues that reported by me almost a year ago still remains in new status, so I just thought your team had no much time to take care of our issues.
When I got something need to be fixed immediately, I also found it was hard to contact any of your guys. I usually get response 2 days latter (duo to time difference) or never.

My another concern is the Chinese document is too out of date. Is there no any Chinese engineer works for App Engine team?
Many Chinese developers still refer to the old document and get mislead. So I receive various App Engine questions every day in my blog or some forums and answer each of them, but I have no easy way to re-share them to most of the other Chinese developers (because Google Groups has been blocked by Chinese government).
I feel like it's very inefficient, and why Google can't do it better?

I know it's difficult for Google to handle so much issues and questions. I mean if 1 Googler service 1000 developer, there may need to be hundreds of Googlers to service more than 100 thousands App Engine developers (so far as I known). It's not easy to manage such a big team and expect the developers won't increase faster than Google's hiring.

At last, I want to ask some questions:
1. Is there a deadline for each issue?
2. How soon can we expect to get resolved when we get emergency problem? Which is the most efficient way like a hotline? (I know there is App Engine for Business Support, but it's expensive for small apps.)
3. Can your team share more articles and details in document instead of the developers themselves collecting informations from Google Groups or I/O sessions?
4. Does Google plan to offer trainings of App Engine developing, or permit 3rd parties to do it?

Hope this update really helps us.
----------
keakon

My blog(Chinese): www.keakon.net



--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group.
To post to this group, send email to google-a...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-appengi...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.

Message has been deleted

Ikai Lan (Google)

unread,
Jan 13, 2011, 12:07:44 PM1/13/11
to Google App Engine
A few answers:

1. We are planning to roll out paid support. This will be the option for any developer that is running a serious business. It's just not possible to offer free emergency support at App Engine's price point. Things might be different if we charged 100x as much, but I suspect that's the worst thing we could possibly do. 

2. No, we do not give ETAs for defect resolution. Defects will be prioritized by the team based on our assessment of impact. 

3. The goal is to improve our documentation. Working in the groups teaches us where our documentation is deficient. I agree that sometimes the articles are hard to find. If you have any documentation suggestions, feel free to open an issue with the label component-docs - though small fixes are much more likely to make it in than large or unspecific fixes.

4. Yes, we are working on programs that will allow third-party developers to offer support and training for App Engine. In fact, if you wanted to do so now, you are more than welcome to, and encouraged to! If this is something you're already doing with existing clients, please contact me off-list so we can start a discussion to make sure we are supporting you correctly (that is, if you're not doing so already).

5. We make a best effort to update docs in other languages. We hear the same thing from our developers in Japan. Translations are unlikely to happen for each release, but our goal is to make major changes available in all the languages we have documentation. If obsolete documentation is doing much more harm than having no documentation, it may make sense for us to revisit whether keeping documentation in other languages is a worthwhile project.

--
Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine



On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 1:58 AM, Philip <philip....@driggle.com> wrote:
I agree with you keakon emergencies are really frustrating if cannot
reach someone. For instance yesterday I had a highly critical problem.
Somehow the latency of my app increased so strong that it couldn't
auto-scale any more (avg request latency went up to 10 seconds) so my
app's instances decreased and the traffic remained the same. My
remaining instances were overloaded and the latency couldn't improve
so I could not get any new instances. A malicious loop. Knowing that
my only way to get support was the issue tracker was really
frustrating because I know it would take days/weeks/months until
someone would help me. Fortunately everything improved by itself after
about 1 hour.

PK

unread,
Jan 14, 2011, 4:01:43 AM1/14/11
to Google App Engine
I did notice that lately you have been going through the bugs and
assigning components and priorities. I am very glad to see this and to
read your post and the commitment to quality. And yes fixing the bugs
is not exciting but is necessary.

In addition, the last release has done amazing things. All the
spurious errors have disappeared from my app, it feels much faster and
uploads are a breeze.

Keep up the good work,
PK
http://www.gae123.com

djidjadji

unread,
Jan 14, 2011, 7:14:47 AM1/14/11
to google-a...@googlegroups.com
I'm unable to add a label component-docs to a new issue, or add it
after submitting it, for
http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list.

For a project on http://code.google.com where i'm a developer I can
add the labels.

2011/1/13 Ikai Lan (Google) <ikai.l...@google.com>:

Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages