Why the astounding silence on some upvoted tickets ?
Asked by cabrol:

Hi dear Atlassian Community support.

As I received this morning this email telling me that there is always someone to answer our questions. I want to ask why the community of users is not getting any answer related to well upvoted tickets ?

<https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD-18559>

<https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD-10600>

Even a negative answer and a closing of a ticket is an answer. But what is observed is that the customers are simply being ignored here (one of the tickets have been opened for 2 entire years).

In the hope our request will get your attention

Kind Regards


Answers:
author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Have a look at the rest of the backlog - would you think you'd be able to answer that many requests and update them regulary?

comments: author: cabrol
body: Hello Nic,

Thanks for having taken the time to answer.

We get that Atlassian developers have many more critical tickets to deal with.

But I would not call a 2 years silence "regularly". Having a status update would be nice (even if not that frequent). It is not the same as implementing the solution but still tells us whether something will ever happen on one front or not.

If 2 years is too short to get to follow up on a (well upvoted) ticket opened by your clients, maybe you are understaffed...

We are a growing team of 15 people already using your paid for cloud solutions (Confluence + Jira + Bitbucket). And knowing that our requests will get answered is important for us as we grow with your products.

In the meantime we will continue upvoting tickets in the hope they get picked or answered at some point.


author: Dusan Cervenka
body: I can put some numbers here from what i see in backlog (so we have official history and we can compare in future):  
overall 58086 opened tickets-\>mermaid ticket 275position based on votes, bcloud 3633 opened tickets-\>Mermaid ticket is on 22position based on votes.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Again, have a think about the numbers. 5,000 employees, 58,000 open issues. Many open for a lot longer than 2 years and far more highly voted on.  

Now narrow it down to that one subject - bitbucket cloud only has a couple of product managers and a handful of developers, and there are 3,500 open issues with it (and that's just the public-facing stuff, there's more support issues).

Atlassian doesn't bother to do "regular update that a request is low priority and we are not doing it just yet" because the customer base should be able to infer that from the fact that there has not been an update. No good organisation would hire people to be paid to do make that pointless noise, they should be hiring people to be be meeting the requests (or analysing them and explaining why it's a no)

If it takes 15 minutes to go chase up why a request is not moving and write something up about it regularly, one full-time person on that would be able to do one update per issue every six months, on just a 3,600 issue backlog.  

You just can't justify wasting so much time on that. It's not even about being understaffed - it's about actually getting stuff done - personally, I would rather hire someone to deal with issues instead of spending time explaining why they've not been done (I'm not an Atlassian though, I don't know how they think on this) . And bear in mind Atlassian are commercial - they're there to make money. Can you show how employing someone to do this generates income that would offset their salary?  

It's not up to me (I'm not an Atlassian), but if it were, I'd be tempted to put a banner across all of Jira issues explaining why we have a large backlog, why we leave issues open for a long time (because we are interested in doing them, but have other more important stuff to do) and a pointer to the docs on how stuff is prioritised.  

2 years is not unusual for an issue to be ignored. I waited 6 years for an update on something I raised against Jira 2. I'm still waiting for a useful update from BMC (Remedy) on two things raised against their software for a lot longer (I don't expect much, given that Remedy is legacy software just waiting to be replaced now and is never going to fix anything)


author: cabrol
body: Totally getting your point on updating for the sake of updating vs. actually handling the tickets or rejecting. Makes sense.

Regarding the case for revenue though, it will not make direct revenue tackling more issues \&/or following up from an Atlassian perspective. But it does allow to retain their customer base vs. the competition in the long run.

Anyway it is good to have a little perspective. As said we will continue upvoting the tickets we would like to see implemented in the future for now.

A banner pointing to how the work is prioritized is actually a good idea!


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Must admit some of it came from talking to a number of places that have public issue tracking, it's a common problem with all of them. It really does come down to the monetary worth of the time spent on updates and refinement. Atlassian do use the list to drive development, but like most, they've never really got to a point where they have run out of urgent stuff to do and think "ok, let's go back and look at the quiet stuff for something to do"

I think you're exactly right on the revenue, but "silence on known stuff" doesn't lose them enough customers to have to think about, it's worth a lot more to spend time on "bigger better more voted known stuff".

Keep going with the voting - there's another conversation about that, but it does include "they do look at votes as part of the process"


Tags: bitbucket-cloud

cloud