Andrew's ramblings

@Andrew

I have reported a bug to the Adobe engineering team, and even though my customer's support agreement called for a 48 hours turn around, the engineering team came back to me with a work around, Adam Lehman personally got involved in this issue also. 

Now just because a hot fix comes out, it doesn't mean that all open bugs will be resolved.  Some bugs, like the one I reported are not meant to be fixed via band aid fixes.  I was briefed by the engineering team that the issue I was experiencing was indeed a bug.  However the fix would touch multiple parts of their codebase and they didn't want to rush through the fix and cause more bugs in the process.  Now I could have blogged about it and made it a big deal, however as a software developer I understand their concern and actually respect their position.

Now, you say that Adam Lehman also got involved in your issue, yes  you didn't like the temporary solution, and you are entitled to that.  But let me ask you this, when have you ever reported a bug to Microsoft, or Oracle and had the actual product manager for the software you were using actually respond to you personally?  That to me looks like a very pro-active management style and I commend Adam for that.

My 2 cents.

I just want to add this, after reading some of the private mail I have received.

People have forgotten that here is a company that in the last to years cut their staff company wide by 20%, for a company to do this means financially they are hurting.

Here is an example, where the product was released to early with known backward compatability issues. Just to please a conference that was running at that time.

That is not only a bad thing to do, but to not follow up with these known issues. Must be costing the company money that they would normally be earning.

So after 5 months, how many people have not upgraded to ColdFusion 9, that would have normally upgraded, and how much money has not entered Adobe's hands because of it.

So my question is and it always has been, why has Adobe not been practive to make sure that people can upgrade as quickly as possible?

@Phill - Ok lets put this in a bit more perspective.

The bug that Andrew is talking about, or a few of them relate to the cfgrid stuff. Adobe update the 3rd party software under the hood to incorporate this. However this change not only was a major change, but the code was rewritten and does break existing applications from using the cfgrid.

The cfgrid refuses to actually display with this bug.

So even though it is a bug, it is also a major code change in ColdFusion that was reported during the beta process and was reported that it would break existing applications, before ColdFusion was released.

The engineer was given an example on how to duplicate the bug, and was told that this bug will stop people from upgrading to the new version of ColdFusion.

So the question now is who made the decision to treat this as a non serious issue? Was it the engineer that received that email, by not passing it on or was it the project manger for saying there are work arounds?

The point is that it does break existing applications, and that should be enough for Adobe to think about getting a fix out the door in a hurry. Because if it stops just a few people upgrading that is money lost to Adobe.

As for the downsize to Adobe, you have to remember that this downsize came during the Global Financial Crisis. A lot of comapnies and large companies closed their doors, Adobe was lucky enough to cut their staff over the 2 years by 20%.

And I have to say the attitude on twitter by Adam the project manager was pure and simply the wrong attitude, and is where Andrew is coming from. Andrew works for a company that can't upgrade to the latest ColdFusion 9 because the existing application suffers from this known issue, and from what I am told is a big job to fix. But the second bug just makes the application not run on ColdFusion 9 at all and there is no work around for that one.

Adobe have made it very clear during the pre-release that certain things were not added, or were changed because it would break backward compatability. And yet when a bug exists that is actually stopping a customer from upgrading, don't you think it should be a high prority that it be fixed as quickly as possible in case it stops further sales?

Adam's attitude was pure and simple, regardless of the fact that it was stopping people from buying the product his attitude was who cares there is a work around. That in my eyes is not what a project manager should be saying, if it is stopping a new customer writing an application then sure there could be a work around who knows as Adam never shared it. But if it is stopping a customer from upgrading and running an existing application on ColdFusion 9 then one has to wonder what Adam was actually thinking.

@Glen,

"The point is that it does break existing applications, and that should be enough for Adobe to think about getting a fix out the door in a hurry. Because if it stops just a few people upgrading that is money lost to Adobe."

Once again, do you honestly think that Adobe is not interested in fixing your issue or mine?  Like you I was very anxious looking through the recent hotfix list for my issue to be fixed, it was not there, it didn't make this cut so maybe it will be in the next hotfix or 9.0.1 release... who knows.  Point is I would much rather have them fix the issue right and not introduce new ones just to make it into the hot fix release.  The fact still stands, in software development some fixes take longer and require more work than others! Regardless of the severity, when fixing bugs in any tracking system, most software developers know that you don't hold up other lesser bugs because you have High severity bugs left in your project.  You come up with a maintenance release plan that is the most effective given the limited time and resources you have within your team to cover the most bugs.

Cheers...