The other day I came across a thread in the forums yet again asking something akin to:

When is <insert issue here> going to get fixed? I’ve been waiting a long time and we desperately need this implemented. What’s taking so long? Can you give me an ETA, it’s been 6 months already!

And was just about to give the same old response I always do, but then I thought why not nip this in the butt right now. So I wrote this rather large reply on what exactly it means when something is on the Wishlist as opposed to a Milestone. Did you happen to read it? No. I figured as much — there’s probably more people reading our blog than an aging forum thread. So here’s the difference again, with a better copy editor this time around.

Take JIRA issue CHD-733 for example, you see that field under the title that says ‘Fix Version/s’ ?

As of this writing its value is Wishlist, which unfortunately implies this issue is not something we’re actively fixing for an upcoming release. That’s not to say it will never be fixed cause we don’t like you, or that it’s too difficult to do, or any other excuse you can think of. The answer is simple: the developers don’t consider it urgent enough, with the limited number of resources we have, to tackle at the moment. That feeling could very well change over time.

On the other hand you’ll know we’re working on something for the near future if it’s categorized as a Milestone. Right now we’re pushing towards Milestone #20 and barring any unforeseen setbacks, everything in that category will be fixed in the next major release. We don’t give hard dates because we can’t meet them a majority of the time — we’d eventually miss a deadline by a landslide and lose your trust completely. What you can depend on us for, is an announcement in the forums when a new release is loaded into the stable code branch.

Oh, and there’s one other value you might see in ‘Fix Version/s’. You ready for it? … ‘None‘. That’s code for “no man’s land” or as JIRA likes to call them, Unscheduled issues. Simply means we haven’t got around to putting them in Wishlist or a Milestone yet.

For future reference you can see the entire list of what we’re up to by bookmarking: Browse Cerberus Helpdesk Project Versions.

You’ll notice right now, we’ve got a whopping 55 issues we’re looking to fix for Milestone #20! And an even bigger number in the Wishlist, 179 to be exact. So how do we decide what issues from the Wishlist are moved over to the next unannounced Milestone? By your votes! Rest assured the staff here go through the list on a regular basis and evaluate issues primarily based on demand vs. design/coding time.

How do you vote? Go to an issue’s web page and look near the bottom of the left sidebar. See that “Voting” section near the bottom:

Click ‘Vote for it‘. You show your support and we schedule it for an upcoming milestone. It’s really that simple!

-joegeck@wgm

There’s always this fear when I post in the forums that if I don’t preface “JIRA” with a long winded explanation, I’ll confuse people. I swear it’s nothing personal I think you’re all really smart! I just worry WGM has turned “JIRA” into one of the most versatile words in the English language by using it in every manner of speech possible.

• noun: “Send this over to JIRA.”
• verb: “That’s a strange bug, go ahead and JIRA it.”
• metaphor: “JIRA’s a giant to-do list for the developers.”
• present participle: “Be right back I’m JIRA‘ing a bug from the forums.”
• preterite: “I just saw your post half hour ago, I JIRA‘d it already.”

So what is JIRA really? JIRA is the software we use for tracking Cerb4’s development. We also use it as kind of a “roadmap” to let the community know where the product is headed. Each issue submitted gets assigned a unique ID and URL, where users can leave feedback and developers can schedule a fix. So when we reply in the forums with an issue’s wgmdev.com web page, what you are actually seeing is the JIRA software in action. It might not be obvious with the WebGroup Media branding all over it, but you see that little footnote way at the bottom — it’s Powered by Atlassian JIRA.

With my paranoia over JIRA’s ambiguity I can’t simply say, “I JIRA’d this request for you.” It’s a sickness really… Instead I’ll write an overdone speech on what that actually means, with every detail spelled out to the letter.

This bug/improvement has been filed in our tracking portal, JIRA, as CHD-99999. The developers will evaluate it and if any progress is made you can track it here <insert URL>. Please vote and provide your feedback, as we take that into consideration when scheduling our next release. You can also sign up for e-mail notifications to see when the status changes.              

What if I went ahead and really did shorten that essay of an explanation down to that one simple statement. Can I assume you’ll know exactly what’s going on? Some of my WGM compadres are more than comfortable typing with that assumption.

I’d love to be too.

-joegeck@wgm

During the last month we’ve focused a lot of energy on improving the Reports area of Cerb4. The couple of token reports that existed in previous builds were more on the “experimental” side than “inspired”. From the start we knew that hacking a couple more reports into the main codebase and calling it a *New Improved Reports Area!* was not a solution we were comfortable with.

A new reports area needed to take care of a few key things:

• Reports are a personalized tool. We’ve seen over the years that most everybody has a unique and specific wish list of reports they’d like to see. For this reason, it needed to be accommodating toward the idea that anybody should be able to make their own favorite report– without having to hack away at the core codebase of Cerb itself. The alternative is just not practical in any sense when we’d be dealing with the multitudes of people simultaneously trying to squeeze their reports into a system that is not built to handle it.

• We wanted to give people helpful documentation on HOW they can take advantage of the new reports functionality. We understand that a few helpful pointers can go a long way toward understanding how to accomplish tasks like creating custom reports.

• They should look good.

• Above all, we wanted to make sure that we created a healthy sample of example reports. A large example set is arguably the most useful tool we could provide to help anybody to be able to make the reports they truly want. We also recognize that not everybody wants to bother creating their own reports (Hey, we understand. You’re busy!). A good choice of prebuilt reports provides the best hope that there is already a report that can help them out today.

We’re proud to say that we think we’ve hit all 4 points.

The new generation of Cerb4 Reports allows plugins to contribute their own reports. This means that a Forums or CRM plugin’s reports won’t clutter the interface or code for people who aren’t using those tools. It also means that anyone can create their own standalone plugin containing their own report creations, and keep them separate from the core codebase. It follows that anybody could share their report plugins with others, giving them access to an easy drop-in installation method of adding new reports.

To get people started we’ve created a couple of detailed wiki articles on creating reports. “Creating a Cerb4 Report Plugin” goes through all the details on how to create a plugin with a basic report. “Adding a Chart to Your Report” is a tutorial on adding a chart to your reports.

The new reports use a more modern charts system from the Yahoo UI library. They look cleaner, they stretch and adjust to the size of the browser window dynamically, and they are much easier to build. Oh, and we definitely think they look good!

As for examples, we poured through the history of forums posts and suggestions to help decide on a list of reports to make available initially. Here’s what the list looks like as of today:

• Group Rosters
• Group Replies By Date
• Top 100 Shared Sender Domains
• Top 100 Spam/Nonspam Words (Explicit Content)
• Top 100 Spam/Nonspam Senders
• Top 100 Spam/Nonspam Domains
• Created Tickets By Group
• Open Tickets By Group
• Closed Tickets By Group
• Top Created Tickets By Contact
• Waiting Tickets By Group
• Oldest Open Tickets By Group
• Worker Replies By Date
• Average Response Time
• Worker History

So check them out for yourself, and feel free to try your hand at creating your own. As usual, any feedback is appreciated.

My new role from the boss upstairs that I decided to undertake is Cerb4 “Community Manager”. You know, that funny job title you hear tossed around popular online companies. It’s gotten so big it’s even entered the video game space over the past decade.

So what kind of monumental changes to Cerb4 can you expect, thanks to my new found powers? It shames me to admit it, but more than likely I’m just going to be that guy who writes to the blog every week. To prepare I’ve been playing with a few ideas on how to spice up our blog space:

• New Tips & Tricks I’ve discovered with all the  hours and hours of Q/A, testing and re-testing Cerb4. Plus more from the rest of our staff. And better yet insightful tips I steal from the forums ;)
• A look at the development process Behind Cerb4. Sharing the how & why we approach fixes and requests the way we do.
• Community Feedback Question & Answer. A chance to highlight problems that come up from time to time for Cerb4 users and more importantly a chance to share the answer with everyone.
• Tutorials and hopefully lots of ‘em. How-to snippets for anything and everything Cerb4. We’d love to throw some more video screencasts up on our website too!
• JIRA Milestone Round-Up, the name and idea is still in development but we’d like to find a way to share our opinions with the community on any unscheduled JIRA issues. By unscheduled we mean they’re still in the “no progress” queue and haven’t been scheduled yet for an upcoming release. We already have internal meetings where we go through these issues one at a time, we want to open up that meeting to you.
• Feature Request Spotlight where we showcase a new idea submitted to JIRA. These will be ripped straight from the mind’s of the Cerb4 community and displayed here for your reading pleasure. This is a way to expose an interesting feature to fresh faces that may have missed it in the junk-pile that is our tracking portal. Hopefully tunneling more votes and feedback so we can gauge interest from an even wider audience.
• Most importantly My Personal Rants on all things Cerberus.

My goal is to find time to do a couple of these write-ups on a regular basis. Got something better? Post it in the comments and tell us how much these ideas stink!

-joegeck@wgm

Hi Cerb4 blog readers!

I’m writing this to let you all know that you’re going to start seeing a lot more contributions submitted by yours truly. I thought I’d write this first post to introduce myself in case you ever want to know who you’re dealing with on a daily basis.

My name’s Joe Geck, nice to meet ya!

I’m the Q/A Lead over at our little company WebGroup Media, WGM for short. We make a product I’m sure you’re familiar with called Cerberus Helpdesk, or Cerb4 as we’re starting to call it. Rolls off the tongue a lot better during sales calls, don’t you agree :)

So yeah I search for bugs, but there’s a lot more couple other things I do too:

• Ever hear of that stable build test we run every so often to get out fresh bug fixes and features to our users? Yeah that’s me.
• Ever wonder how all those ideas in the forums get transcribed to WGM’s feature tracking portal. Yeah that’s me again.
• And who writes those boring follow-up posts?

JIRA’d

This bug/improvement has been filed in our tracking portal for the developers to take a look at, if any progress is made you can track it here.

Me again, the artist in the forums formerly known as joewgm. FYI I decided to change my forum profile to my real name, joegeck, just to make it consistent across the WGM brand. Thankfully it’s also easy to remember, 2-syllables, short and sweet!

Oh yeah one last thing I almost forgot, every once in a while you may find me installing your purchased copy of Cerb4. I always look forward to getting customers up and running ASAP :)

Until next time feel free to keep tabs on me in the forums.

-joegeck@wgm