Bugs and Mitigation

As mentioned on the Shockey Monkey conference call this week I’ve squashed all the bugs that have been reported throught the last week or so. I’m also addressing the current showstoppers as identifed by the folks on the conference call. Just to clarify the intent here – priority in development is given to people that have adopted the product for their business use and see it causing a lot of pain and issues for them. Those showstoppers are as follows:

• Ability to create a ticket via email
• Company update issues
• Email parsing issues
• Ability to change subjects
• Ability to offer user autoregistration*

* = difficult to solve. Someone requested it be supported via email, which isn’t going to happen until email becomes an authentic form of communication (ie: never); With SPAM, spoofing, forging and so on there is no way to provide any level of authenticity to the accounts that are being created via email. However, a web-self-registration stuff is under development, will have it ready by the May 23 feature refresh along with all the rest of the stuff above.

I’ve gone through all the bugs and fixed them, with the exception of about 5 issues that I was unable to replicate on my own. If you could be so kind to login and update the bug report with the detailed actions you took to cause it I’ll gladly get it done, I can virtually promise I will have it update on May 23rd.

A little note on bugs and releases

I patch the security and critical bugs in realtime. Shockey Monkey has a development and release branches which as the name implies hold the currently active code and the code I am working on.

If a security issue is identified it is patched and automatically rolled out to all the users.

If its a feature fix it gets fixed in the development tree instead. There are a few reasons for this:

• Security fixes are usually either 1 line or an extra loop check. I can quickly replicate them to the development branch of the code.
• I intend to release bug fixes on weekends, during the weekly maintenance window for Own Web Now Corp which is 3–7AM EST Saturday.
• The feature rollups/fixes are released periodically for two reasons: It’s easier to manage and its easier to solve a huge set of bugs and eliminate problems before new ones pop up.

Also keep in mind that as I fix these bugs I am also rolling in new features so the less branches and patches the better. Also remember that this is not a single web app running in an isolated space on a box that nobody ever touches – each code change, given enough stupidity on my part, can take down the entire farm. So every bug/fix I do has to be stress tested, etc.

This week was different from previous weeks in that the patch/update will be held off until Wednesday, May 23rd. Here is what’s at play. I am going to be out of town next Saturday. There is a big conference starting Friday where I will be meeting many of you that are using Shockey Monkey and breaking it down piece by piece. I am introducing two HUGE feature sets into the Monkey and just wanted to go through another few days of testing and checking before it went live.

Of note, Shockey Monkey changelog is now available at http://www.shockeymonkey.com/changelog.asp