Does Using JIRA Matter? Lindens Say Yes, No... Maybe

In recent months, two items have generated record-breaking Resident support on JIRA, the Lindens' official software feature request/bug tracker.  This despite JIRA's profoundly user-unfriendly system (you have to log in with your SL account name and password, for instance, and existing issues are remarkably difficult to locate.)  Spurred by lobbying from a coalition of Second Life bloggers, however, a request to expand the maximum number of groups a Resident can belong to from its current 25 has received 1052 votes so far.  Galvanized by a rash of alleged content theft, another JIRA request begging the Lindens to deal with the matter has 901 and counting.  As such, both are easily the most popular requests (most other issues hover far below 100 votes.)

Yet despite this groundswell, each issue remains Unassigned.  When I asked Robin Linden about the group request, Robin said it was on the Lindens' To Do list-- but gave no indication that the large JIRA vote had moved that feature up in development priority.  With the content theft issue, the Lindens have made no official response.  Given that, the question becomes: Why should Residents continue using JIRA when it doesn't seem to influence Linden development to any significant degree? 

I put that question to the Lindens' PR, and after some delay, got this reply:

"The Public JIRA does influence Linden development, but it’s not the only factor we consider when embarking on specific projects," someone named Aric Rubin, QA Studio Director of Studio Legba, wrote me.  (Apparently a third party contractor with the Lindens, though I'm not clear on that point as yet.) [See Update below.] "We use it to help guide us in setting priorities for issues found in the wild, to bring in patches from the Open SLDEV community and to help with the dialog between internal and external communities."

Perhaps in relation to these two recent JIRA issues, Rubin said this:  "[W]hen a feature improvement receives a groundswell of Resident support expressed via PJIRA, we need to carefully weigh current technical, business, and resourcing considerations and priorities before taking on the project.

"That said," he added, "we urge Residents to continue to use PJIRA to let us know what they consider to be priorities."

Update, 3:35pm:  Linden PR rep Peter Lewis clarifies this point in a follow-up e-mail:  "Developer teams at Linden are divided into 'studios' - Legba is one of those."

Comments

[Lordfly Digeridoo]

Last I heard, increasing group limits wasn't a trivial matter, the spaghetti code that is LL's poorly hacked together system means that increasing group limits exponentially increases database load, or something similar.

As for the content theft issue, what is there to do that's technical? Any DRM scheme will be circumvented, full stop. Social attempts at stopping the theft proves laughable, and LL can't scale their support team nearly as large as it would need to field all the "THEY STOLEZ M Y STUFFS" requests, I imagine.

[Ann Otoole]

if they took the time and expense to hire the right type of expertise and did the due diligence then just dealing with the groups problem would likely cause a dramatic cascade of improvements across the entire system.

but they won't. and its nice to know "P"jira is really a waste of time.

Next CEO, CTO, heck next entire slate of executives please.

[Laetizia Coronet]

I guess the question if the JIRA works can be substituted by another question: is the JIRA meant as a bug tracker or is it meant to introduce democracy into the running of SL?
My guess is that it's primary a bug tracker, and that having a maximum of 25 groups is not a 'bug'.

[Ann Otoole]

actually Laetiza, you can have more than 25 groups. the limit is a client app limitation.

i've been in more than 25 groups because of some bug in the system but the app only displays 25. and the latest party for concierge members resulted in a number of people getting a 26th group. it didn't lay waste to the grid but they can't up the limit in the app until they decide to do the analysis and rewrite a major chunk of code. it is not something they are inclined to do given rosedale's historical comments in which he stated they will never rewrite.

should never say never... it usually comes back to bite.

and yes "p"jira is best used as a defect reporting system only. asking for features is generally lost time unless you are submitting a code patch to go with the request. a properly documented reproducible defect does not require a single vote or emotional debate to be addressed.

[Kristian]

Hammy, you should do pieces on the different studios in LL. Also be great to know why they chose the names they did -- Papa Legba is a very important part of Voodoo and I'm curious as to why they'd choose him.

[Ann Otoole]

Kristan, don't tell me you cannot see the arrogance behind the selection of Legba as the illuminary and symbol for a work group that functions between the "p"jira and LL. maybe they think it is folly but the psychological problems at LL are clearly a part of this behavior.

I'm not even going to get into this travesty in detail other than to say i hope the new CEO deals with this sort of culture problem in a manner that sends a clear message.

[Dale Innis]

Oh, c'mon: they use the JIRA to get information from the Residents. It's cool that the channel exists, and of course it would be even cooler if it were better an' easier to use an' all, but that's true of everything.

The fact that they don't automatically fix the first N most-voted-for things in JIRA doesn't mean JIRA's therefore useless; that's just silly. The two top-voted-for things currently in JIRA are in fact *hard to fix*.

I don't know what the theory behind complaints like this is, frankly. "The Lindens know that the Residents want these things fixed, and they could fix them, but they aren't fixing them because...". Because what? They're in league with Satan? They're being paid by the Greys not to fix them? They secretly hate us?

Or maybe they really *don't* have a magic wand that they could wave and fix it all, eh?

/me shakes head in bafflement.

[Miriel Enfield]

"They secretly hate us?"

Sadly, I've seen people saying just that.

[Ann Otoole]

It isn't that they will not fix something. It is the absence of business acumen in public relations that makes LL look like they don't care.

Content theft can be dealt with in a more professional manner. A DMCA take down on a stolen skin should result in the offending skin and associated textures being deleted from the asset system. This would result in all residents that bought the illegal content losing it. And their recourse would be to go after the person that sold it to them. in court or via peer pressure.

The problem with groups makes visible design issues that need to be addressed. LL needs to deal with this and not behave as though residents are stupid. Especially when we now all know there is no trigger in the database that prevents 25 groups per account. To say you do not understand your own product design is rather baffling. This is clearly something for the new CEO to work on.

[Laetizia Coronet]

"...paid by the Greys..."

Look around you on the grid. They are everywhere... ;-)

[Dale Innis]

@Miriel: That's the trouble with having lots and lots of customers; some of them always enjoy drama a bit too much. :)

@Ann: I would be quite surprised if the Lindens weren't doing exactly what their legal team tells them they need to do to comply with the relevant laws. Do we really know that they've received actual and valid DMCA takedown notices (see "http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi" etc), as opposed to for instance unsigned pseudonymous forum postings, and ignored them? This would surprise me, but if there's actual (as opposed to rumored) evidence of it, I'd be interested in a pointer.

On the group limit, I haven't seen the Lindens either "behave as though residents are stupid", or say that they do not understand their own product design. They have in fact summarized the difficult technical issues involved, in a relatively non-condescending way. It's true that the limit of 25 is in some sense artificial, in that they *could* raise it at any time. But, as they've said, doing so would have a deleterious impact on the performance and stability of the Grid. And I seem to recall that people get a bit upset when they do things that impact the performance and stability of the Grid... :)

[Cyn Vandeverre]

Whatever Legba's significance in Voodoo/Vodoun is, he's also a side character which is a rooster, in a Terry Pratchett novel. It's entirely possible that the group chose the name without realizing it had any other significance. I'm fairly widely read in matters of myth, legend, and religion, but had not heard of the connection before today. To assume it was intentional arrogance without some other proof is foolish.

[theshadowinsl]

As I've mentioned before in several places, within the comments of the JIRA item about raising the group limit their were several workable solutions, several of which don't require an extensive rewrite (even if that should happen). These solutions while not from the working teams at LL, are solutions from real programmers and others in the industry... So it's not like they are just fantastic concepts out of thin air that would be hard to implement... But LL has never commented either in the comments or anywhere else on any suggestion put forth as a solution.