[Youtrack] Reported bugs - please manage my expectations

Over the past months I have reported some bugs in the Youtrack system. Apart from trivial things in SDK documentation which I guess have beeen fixed quickly, all the bugs I reported are either submitted or open. No comments have been made by McNeel staff on any of them. No schedule on if or when I can expect these bugs to be fixed, either in V5 of V6 (both would be fine).

Now I understand that you are busy - for instance with V6 development. Still, it would be nice if you could manage my expectations on the resolution of these issues. So far, I do not see the value of reporting them, as nothing gets done. Being a software developer I know that this is the way to get these problems resolved, so I will keep reporting bugs if I find them in the hope they will get fixed.

Are there more people with similar experiences in the McNeel Youtrack system?

I don’t think you should be expecting anything different from reporting them any other way - except that you can be very sure that they are in fact on the list and that nobody had to interpret your words to get them into the right system.

I expect that issues can be on the pile for a rather long period without anyone really interacting with them in any way. Word has it that voting on issues is looked at so I guess you could try to get people here on Discourse to vote up your bugs.

Hi Menno,

The YouTrack system is what our developers work off of. So if it isn’t on this list, it isn’t going to get worked on.

In general, if an item is marked “Submitted” it has not been look at by the developer (yet). If the item is marked “Open” then the item has been read by the developer and has been deemed worth keeping.

If you feel your item hasn’t received the attention you want, you can always add a comment and “@” mention the developer, which will notify him via email. Hopefully this will trigger a response.

Keep in mind that all of our developers have large pile of stuff that they are working on. And, every item is somebody’s high priority.

Does this help?

– Dale

Just so that you know how large the pile is, there are 6,790 open items as of this morning.

What would make this situation better for you? Can you provide an example of what it is we can do to improve this?


I did a quick search of issues you created
http://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issues?q=created+by%3A+menno

There are 7 total and 2 of them have been resolved. Several are still on my list since they are SDK related and I am currently working on other projects (Mac and display).

Like I said, the two that were resolved were SDK documentation issues, which are rather trivial to solve. The others - not a peep.

I suppose if there was some kind of message like “we expect to start work on this issue by [date - may be far in the future] and we aim to resolve it in Rhino {5|6|7} SRn”, posted let’s say, within two weeks of an issue being reported. At least give me some clue that it has been seen, maybe also tag it with severity how you perceive it.

When we know something about a bug being resolved soon or late, we can plan our effort to work around it. For example, if we know that a bug is solved at the next SR, we may hold back a feature and roll out the SR to the users, rather than invest time in creating a workaround.

Maybe I ask too much and should accept the situation as it is, idk…

Anything I write down would most likely be a lie. It is extremely hard to predict when an issue will be worked on unless it is at the top of my list of issues.

  • When an issue is created, it has a state of “Submitted”
  • Once I look at an issue, I change its state to “Open”
  • If I am actively working on an issue, I change it’s state to “In Progress”
  • My short list of issues that need attention after I finish me “In Progress” issues are marked as “Next Up”

I personally have 909 outstanding “issues” in our youtrack as of today. Of course there are other issues that aren’t even being properly recorded in youtrack that I’m also working on. This makes things pretty hard to guess when things will get worked on.

The best I can do right now is show where issues currently sort by their state.
http://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issues?q=for%3A+steve+sort+by%3A+state