I notice that Jason, Folknology, Andy, and Interactive_Matter do not touch on the question of ticketing. Is that an oversight, or do you not see my point?
That is a critical area. At least as important as open repositories, because ticketing is the interface between XMOS and its customers about the issues they are having. (OK, some feedback is provided on the forum, but there is no guarantee of that, and forums are fragmented and hard to search.)
Since it's the issues that take up the majority of time in software and hardware development, and often its the issues that make a product fail, or a project run over budget, one could argue that handling of issues is much more important than repositories. When we raise a ticket, it's because we are in trouble. And when we are in trouble, we want to see if someone has already raised a ticket for the issue, and if we can provide more data, or find out what's happening to solve the issue. Perhaps the ticket was closed by simply emailing a patch, or some simple information to the customer. That information is in the secret ticketing system, and nobody else can see it. Hmmm!
Several reasons are offered to justify ticket systems that are not open. The only ones that hold water relate to private IP and security. These are obvious, and I have no argument with them.
We could go into this in depth, but most of the other reasons can be traced to
- The desire to hide poor quality or a ticket backlog
The desire to conceal the size of the team
The desire to keep unflattering features of the organization from the light of day
- How many times have you wanted to know if a question had been raised on a ticket and answered?
How many times have you not bothered to raise a ticket, feeling you were wasting your time?
Have you ever raised a ticket that was not taken seriously? If so, how can you prove it?
- How can you prove that you support your customers well?
Have you ever looked at the list of open and closed tickets?
Is support prioritized in your organization? OK, then what's the average lifetime of a ticket?
When tickets are solved by email or phone, do you incorporate those answers into an open knowledge base?
Do product managers track the tickets against their products?
Thank You to XMOS for providing this venue for discussion.
Best wishes to all,
--r
Kaizen is our goal,
Fearfulness yields to knowledge,
A flower blossoms.