comments inline:
--- In [email protected], Trevor Squires <tre...@...> wrote:
> Hey,
Hi
> Disclosure: In the past I worked for ENTP (the makers of Tender and
> Lighthouse) but the opinions I express here are my own.
Wow, didn't expect such direct input :) Awesome!
> To me, bug tracking has a lot of ceremony surrounding milestones,
> priorities, statuses etc. On the other hand customer support has very little
> ceremony: pretty much anything the customer wants to talk about is fair game
> and they don't really care that the thing they talked about has been
> reassigned from myself to a colleague.
> Like I said before, I think the ceremony of bug tracking is completely
> different from the ceremony of user support. Given that ceremony dictates
> the "internal logic", I've come to the opposite conclusion than you: the
> internal logic is completely different.
That's true. I was actually a little bit ignoring the matter of "user support"
in favor of "feature requests", which in my observation had quite a lot in
common with bug reports.
But as simple "user questions" obviously have quite their own way of (both
internal, as well as visual) handling and as it is with no doubt a major part
of overall user support, it indeed makes sense to separate both systems.
Actually my position is by no means a "separate sucks, combined better", but
that a combination of both seemed more natural to me (having read your
response, I no longer see it that way though ;) ).
> It's not a visual separation - it's much more fundamental than that. Each
> product was designed starting at "what should it do?" moving towards "what
> data needs to be stored?".
I guess my lack of own deep experience with either of both systems led to my
wrong observation of the matter.
However as I'm just trying to figure out which flavor of system to use myself,
there is no experience to build on. ;)
> In the end, there may seem to be some duplication of "what data needs to be
> stored" but the similarities, especially in terms of business logic, are
> dwarfed by the differences.
Yeah. But I wasn't too wrong with my observation of "feature requests" and "bug
reports" having quite a lot in common in regards of handling, was I?
> If "what list does it belong to" is the *only* difference then sure! But I
> find it hard to believe that you could drive the *entire* difference in
> workflows based on a single (effectively boolean) flag.
> In my experience, two highly-focused systems that talk to each other via a
> single, well-defined, integration point will *always* be simpler to maintain
> than one system that tries to do two different things.
> It's easier to get complex behaviour by assembling a bunch of simple things
> that work together than it is to make one thing that does it all.
Yes, one would probably end up with lots of highly nested if conditionals.
Easier to maintain twice the code base, than maintaining one hell of a
confusing mess of code :P
Makes totally sense now.
> It depends on where you're coming from. If you're a customer who wants both
> products, you may think you're being double-billed. If you only want one
> product, then you're only paying for the development effort on that
> product's features.
Btw, hope the "double billing" comment was not taken as offense :( It just
crossed my mind at some point. ;)
> Keeping the products distinct does mean that they can proceed independently
> and there's a lot less chance of stuff like "sorry guys, we can't implement
> this customer-support feature because we're still refactoring the 'one true
> table' to support a new bug-tracking feature".
Uh, that would suck, sure.
> Well, I hope this doesn't come across as really condescending, I believe
> that's where you're going wrong.
> The product is not the rows and columns, or the algorithms, or the views.
> The product is how you interact with it: what it asks of the user and what
> it gives back.
Thanks a lot for your very insightful response!
Now I guess I'll have to give the whole thing another fresh whirl and see what
I end up with. :P
Both Tender and Lighthouse look fantastic btw!
Once again, thanks a lot!
Vincent
Ps: (had to rearrange a few responses to group them topic-wise, content should
not have been affected though ;) )
