[Deploying Sakai] Ask the community: Your institution and Sakai bug reports

[Gordon, Patricia S. (Trisha) (psg3a)]

Shawn, 

Great questions! I¹ve embedded responses to your questions below that we
employ at the University of Virginia.
---
Trisha Gordon
Director, UVaCollab Applications & Support
University of Virginia




On 1/30/15, 12:45 PM, "Shawn Foster" <sfoster9 at uwo.ca> wrote:

>Some questions about Sakai bug reports:
>
>1. Does your instance of Sakai generate bug reports? YES
>
>2. How does your institution deal with bug reports generated from Sakai?

What we do depends on the type of bug report. Here are a few of the
scenarios we address:

* We follow-up with the user for any bug report with a *comment*
(³comment" will appear in the subject line as well as in the body of the
report). 
** We contact the user whether or not they have entered text into the
comment because we know these types of bug reports indicate that an error
was displayed to the user.
** We identify the site and the tool involved in our response to the user
(based on the Requested URL found in the bug report).
** Sometimes we can determine the nature of the problem by the stack
trace/tool and sometimes not. When we¹re not sure, we ask the user to
provide details about the action that seemed to trigger the error to help
us troublehsoot. If the bug is known but relatively benign (such as
evidence that the user clicked the Back button on the browser and
encountered a NPE), we provide a standard response to help the user avoid
that problem in the future.

* A sudden large influx of bug reports with the same identifier string in
the Subject line gets our attention pretty quickly.
** Initially, we look for commonalities in the bug reports and our
response depends on what is at issue: e.g., is it from only one or sub-set
of our front-end servers? (we pull the server(s) out of rotation asap).
** Sometimes it might be determined to be an incident (and a response team
gets busy to manage and resolve it) and other times it might be a single
frustrated user repeatedly clicking a button.
** Bottom line: These types of bug reports require a closer a look as
quickly as possible.
** Part of our procedure will be to look for a report of the error on the
Sakai community jira or mailing lists and apply a patch if one is
available. Otherwise, we will send out email to the community mailing
list(s) and/or our contracted vendor for additional guidance/help. If our
developers are able to find and fix a problem in the code, we¹ll apply the
fix locally and contribute the patch back to the community Jira.

* We've learned which bug reports can be ignored, which will be most of
them.

>
>3. Does someone at your institution read/monitor the bug report email?

We do. See Q2

>
>4. Do you follow up with your users who leave comments?

See Q2.

>
>5. Do you follow up with your users who don't leave comments but who
>cause a bug report?

Usually not.

>
>Thanks for your opinions and anecdotes,
>-Shawn
>
>-- 
>Shawn Foster
>eLearning Technology Support and Application Development
>Information Technology Services
>Western University
>London, Ontario, Canada
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