TrueNAS Suggestion Tickets

[Kris Moore]

FreeNAS (And soon to be TrueNAS CORE) community,

I wanted to take a moment to give users a quick heads up on some changes being made to our TrueNAS bug ticketing system today.

As many of you know, we’ve historically had three ticket types available in our tracker. Bugs, Features, and Improvements, which are all fairly self-explanatory. After some discussion internally, we’ve decided to implement a new type of ticket, a “Suggestion”. These will be replacing Feature / Improvement requests for our TrueNAS community, leaving open Bugs and Suggestions. They will also have a slightly different workflow than before.

One issue we’ve had in the past with Features and Improvements is that just about all the ideas are “good” ideas. (There are some exceptions of course). This has at times made it very challenging for iX engineers to determine what we should bring into the product. Just because something is a “good” idea, it doesn’t always help us determine how many people are interested and makes the process of picking and choosing somewhat arbitrary. The suggestion ticket has been created to help us better gage interest in particular requests, by implementing the following workflow:

As demonstrated above, we’re going to be looking to the community to help “Vote” on issues to provide an indication to our team what kind of interest there is for any particular idea. Once a Suggestion has reached a the vote threshold (10 votes right now), we will then put it into a Review state, and then make a determination of if/when it should land on our TrueNAS roadmap.

So, how do you vote for a Suggestion? Easy! Simply login to our ticket system, find your issue and click the “Vote for this issue” link on the top right of each ticket.

The rest is up to you! To help create interest you can solicit your Suggestion requests here on the forums, social media and elsewhere. We’re expecting that this new process will allow us to be more responsive to the needs and wants of our community and bring change to the product in a timely manner.

Thanks for reading and as always, feedback is welcome!

 

[Redcoat]

Thanks, Chris. FYI, workflow pic/graphic invisible here...

 

[Kris Moore]

Thanks, Chris. FYI, workflow pic/graphic invisible here...

Sorry, refresh, should be fixed now.

 

[Redcoat]

Sorry, refresh, should be fixed now.

Fixed, thx.

 

[Hazimil]

Are current feature/improvements being converted to suggestions, or would we have to log them again?

Thanks,
Jonathan

 

[Kris Moore]

We have some requests going back to 2015, so we're planning on closing most of those out and asking folks to re-enter them, so we know whats still fresh / current :)

 

[Basil Hendroff]

Once a Suggestion has reached a the vote threshold (10 votes right now), we will then put it into a Review state, and then make a determination of if/when it should land on our TrueNAS roadmap.

I like the ruling.

So, how do you vote for a Suggestion? Easy! Simply login to our ticket system, find your issue and click the “Vote for this issue” link on the top right of each ticket.

I'm not so sure.

What sets the FreeNAS community participation model apart from most other forums is the visible split between the Community Forum and JIRA, the Bug Reporting System. Of course, JIRA is much more than this. I think this is a fantastic approach and other forums should review this model because it works really well.

I do wonder about moving suggestions to JIRA though. One of the issues I see is the loss of visibility of the suggestion from the forum. For experienced forum members, JIRA may be second nature. For newer members, or members unfamiliar with the split model, JIRA can seem foreign. For a start, it requires separate credentials for logging in.

What's interesting is that there is already a system for polling in the forum. I'm not sure why it isn't used more or why it wasn't considered as the means of voting for a suggestion?

The rest is up to you! To help create interest you can solicit your Suggestion requests here on the forums, social media and elsewhere.

Not so easy. For example, look at the advertising under my signature block to see what I've had to do to solicit votes for a suggestion. Whatever approach a person adopts, there still needs to be a link back to JIRA. The result is a range of unharmonised approaches for vote solicitation.

For members who don't have a JIRA login. voting can appear bothersome. It's not just a matter of 'click this button to vote'. It's more like 'Create a login first, and then click this button to vote'.

One issue we’ve had in the past with Features and Improvements is that just about all the ideas are “good” ideas. (There are some exceptions of course). This has at times made it very challenging for iX engineers to determine what we should bring into the product. Just because something is a “good” idea, it doesn’t always help us determine how many people are interested and makes the process of picking and choosing somewhat arbitrary.

If awareness can be raised about the polling system in the forum, polling seems to address several challenges for suggestions:

1. Makes the voting process simpler for the voter;
2. Setup of the poll for the promoter of the suggestion should be straightforward. This, in turn, helps to streamline the way solicitation of votes for suggestions occur; and
3. The high visibility of the poll on the forum means that the number of votes collected better reflects community interest on the suggestion, particularly if a vote cast makes the poll reappear within Latest Posts again.