Quality Portal going to be moved

[Uwe Raabe 1890]

You might already have seen it: When you go to https://quality.embarcadero.com/ there is a notice at the top saying:

Quote

Attention: Embarcadero is migrating its customer bug and feature request reporting portal to a new system. This site will remain accessible as a read only repository. We'll shortly provide information on how to access and report bugs in the new portal.

So be prepared (presumably already today) for not being able to file new reports or edit/comment on existing ones. Searching and reading should be possible.

 

While this will most certainly lead to complaints, it is definitely a good thing and long awaited change.

[tgbs 10]

Since it will be read-only, they should transfer all unresolved issues to the new system so that they can be commented on

[Anders Melander 1639]

1 hour ago, Uwe Raabe said:

it is definitely a good thing and long awaited change.

Why is it definitely a good thing? The current system seems to work fine.

I can understand why they would want to migrate away from their old, unsupported Jira server but without knowing what they are going to replace it with it's hard to say if it will be an improvement.

 

11 minutes ago, tgbs said:

Since it will be read-only, they should transfer all unresolved issues to the new system so that they can be commented on

Don't count on it. The last time they switched system all the existing data were left behind and lost.

[Uwe Raabe 1890]

4 minutes ago, Anders Melander said:

I can understand why they would want to migrate away from their old, unsupported Jira server but without knowing what they are going to replace it with it's hard to say if it will be an improvement.

AFAIK, they plan to internally use a cloud based Jira (you won't get any other) while getting rid of the public QP instance in favor of limited public access to the new one. At least that has been discussed for quite a while, because the synchronization between the internal and external instance was error prone and often lagging behind. So the statement that the current system seems to work fine probably didn't take into account the whole picture.

 

On the other hand, as I mentioned in my initial post, such criticism was somehow expected. The same as my expectations are mostly based on speculation, so are others. Personally I just feel better expecting an improvement. So for me it stays to be a good thing until it turns out otherwise.

[Leif Uneus 40]

Last time this happened you were supposed to repost your unresolved QC contributions into the new system.

And after some time the old QC portal was completely removed.

[Remy Lebeau 1260]

1 hour ago, Leif Uneus said:

Last time this happened you were supposed to repost your unresolved QC contributions into the new system.

And after some time the old QC portal was completely removed.

I was just thinking the same thing!  So many QC tickets were lost, and not linked/duplicated into QP tickets.

[Anders Melander 1639]

1 hour ago, Uwe Raabe said:

a cloud based Jira (you won't get any other)

That's not quite true. Jira Server is EOL in february this year but there's still Jira Data Center which is also on-prem (and extremely expensive).

 

1 hour ago, Uwe Raabe said:

limited public access to the new one.

So the question is what "limited" means.

 

Jira is licensed per-user and I'm guessing that they're not going to buy a license for each of their Delphi users.

 

Instead they might be going with Jira Cloud internally and Jira Service Management (JSM, formerly Service Desk) externally. JSM is licensed per agent (internal user) with unlimited externals users (called "external customer" in JSM). I trialed JSM many years ago for external support but back then it was still licensed per external user and didn't really work that well, compared to something like ZenDesk.

 

As far as I know JSM does not allow one external user to see the issues raised by other external users. I.e. it's a support system; There's no interaction between external users.

So if JSM is the solution they are going for I don't see it as an improvement.

 

1 hour ago, Uwe Raabe said:

So the statement that the current system seems to work fine probably didn't take into account the whole picture.

As I customer I don't really care about what goes on behind the curtain. From my POW it seemed to work fine but I guess you point was that it only seemed that way.

 

I wish I could have your admirable optimism.

[Darian Miller 336]

4 minutes ago, Anders Melander said:

As far as I know JSM does not allow one external user to see the issues raised by other external users. I.e. it's a support system; There's no interaction between external users.

So if JSM is the solution they are going for I don't see it as an improvement.

I sure hope that's not the case...    I mean, people make fun of JIRA all the time but it does have some pretty powerful features.  I think JIRA sucks and JSM sucks what JIRA wouldn't.

 

It looks like we may be in for a huge loss of publically accessible information (years of data to be removed from public access AGAIN) and a much crippled support system...  all to save some money?
 

I'll attempt to withhold more judgement until we see more...  maybe we will all be pleasantly surprised.  One can hope.

 

[David Heffernan 2300]

2 hours ago, Leif Uneus said:

Last time this happened you were supposed to repost your unresolved QC contributions into the new system.

Sucks to be us

[Dalija Prasnikar 1341]

2 hours ago, Anders Melander said:

Instead they might be going with Jira Cloud internally and Jira Service Management (JSM, formerly Service Desk) externally. JSM is licensed per agent (internal user) with unlimited externals users (called "external customer" in JSM). 

Your assumption is correct. And like you said self hosted JIRA is no longer an option.

 

2 hours ago, Anders Melander said:

As far as I know JSM does not allow one external user to see the issues raised by other external users. I.e. it's a support system; There's no interaction between external users.

So if JSM is the solution they are going for I don't see it as an improvement.

AFAIK, there is an option to set visibility of all issues to be automatically visible to all customers, but that option is not a default one. So I don't think visibility should be a problem here.

[Anders Melander 1639]

2 hours ago, Darian Miller said:

I mean, people make fun of JIRA all the time but it does have some pretty powerful features.  I think JIRA sucks and JSM sucks what JIRA wouldn't.

I actually like Jira a lot. There are some things that could be better (wasted screen space, responsiveness, lack of basic features that can only be resolved with 3rd party plugins) but I don't think there's anything else that comes close to it as an issue tracker. Atlassian, however, can go to hell. I've been using their products for 20 years and I've lost count of the number of times I've sworn never to touch any of their products again. So a love/hate relationship basically.

 

57 minutes ago, Dalija Prasnikar said:

AFAIK, there is an option to set visibility of all issues to be automatically visible to all customers, but that option is not a default one. So I don't think visibility should be a problem here.

If that is the case, and JSM has improved substantially since I last looked at it (and from what I can see in their marketing material, it has), I think this might end up being an okay solution.

 

With regard to loss of existing data, as far as I can tell, the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant (the software that migrates data from server to cloud) only support Jira Server 7.6 or later. Embarcadero's Jira Server is version 6.4, released in 2015 - and it's probably been customized...

There are ways to solve that but it's a painful and fragile process involving incrementally upgrading the server to reach a supported version: 6.4 -> 7.0 -> 7.6 -> Cloud

Edited January 26 by Anders Melander

[Darian Miller 336]

1 hour ago, Anders Melander said:

I don't think there's anything else that comes close to it as an issue tracker

There are a few contenders.  The thing that puts JIRA over the top for many is the integration with Confluence.  

 

This one looks pretty nice: https://linear.app/

 

But lately I've just been using GitHub's simple issue tracker for personal stuff (and JIRA at work)   In my last job, I wrote our ticketing system (in Delphi) and after a decade it had 400,000+ tickets in it and we were very productive using it as it was customized to our way of working and I simply got used to it and prefer nothing else.  Switching to the JIRA takes effort as everything feels a little slow/clunky.  

 

[Vincent Parrett 657]

14 minutes ago, Darian Miller said:

There are a few contenders.  The thing that puts JIRA over the top for many is the integration with Confluence.  

Confluence is an abomination - full of security holes, new CVE's every week. Our instance has been hacked twice - both times by bitcoin minors, requiring us to build a new vm and restore from backup. We're close to completing our migration away from it thankfully. 

 

I'm not sure that Jira JSM is the right way to go, given that Embarcadero doesn't really do support 🤦‍♂️ 

 

 

[Joseph MItzen 243]

12 hours ago, Darian Miller said:

It looks like we may be in for a huge loss of publically accessible information (years of data to be removed from public access AGAIN) and a much crippled support system...  all to save some money?

 

If the only motivation was saving some money they could use an open source alternative, such as

https://www.openproject.org/blog/open-source-jira-alternative/

or the brand new

https://plane.so/

 

 

[Dalija Prasnikar 1341]

Moving QP is not about saving money, nor it is directly related to current outage. It was something that has been planed for quite some time (this has been disclosed to MVPs) because Atlassian no longer supports JIRA on premises which Embarcadero uses.

 

https://blogs.embarcadero.com/embarcadero-quality-portal-migration/

 

So they are logically moving their internal system to Atlassian Cloud and the front for customers will use Jira Service Management. It would be rather ridiculous to use full fledged JIRA for customers and pay millions for features that we couldn't use anyway. JSM seems like a good option in this case. And issues will be visible to everyone.

[Anders Melander 1639]

8 hours ago, Dalija Prasnikar said:

Atlassian no longer supports JIRA on premises which Embarcadero uses.

Atlassian hasn't supported the version of Jira that Embarcadero uses since 2017...

https://www.atlassian.com/blog/2017/03/end-of-support-for-jira-6-4

 

8 hours ago, Dalija Prasnikar said:

https://blogs.embarcadero.com/embarcadero-quality-portal-migration/

Quote

For the time being, the existing Quality Portal system will remain accessible read only. The data on the old system will remain visible, even after the new portal will be in place.

As I interpret that, they will not be migrating data from the old to the new system.

[Dalija Prasnikar 1341]

24 minutes ago, Anders Melander said:

Atlassian hasn't supported the version of Jira that Embarcadero uses since 2017...

I meant that JIRA Server is no longer supported https://www.atlassian.com/migration/assess/journey-to-cloud and this was known for some time.

 

24 minutes ago, Anders Melander said:

As I interpret that, they will not be migrating data from the old to the new system.

Their internal JIRA will be migrated fully. So there will be no loss of issues in internal system. As far as the public one is concerned, I don't know whether it will be migrated or not and what are the possible issues. Evidently, it will not be migrated right away.

Edited January 27 by Dalija Prasnikar

[Anders Melander 1639]

1 hour ago, Dalija Prasnikar said:

Their internal JIRA will be migrated fully. So there will be no loss of issues in internal system. As far as the public one is concerned, I don't know whether it will be migrated or not and what are the possible issues. Evidently, it will not be migrated right away.

I guess from their perspective the internal ones are the most important, and I guess, rationally, from the customer perspective too.

 

Unless they are going to replicate the existing system of having two different Jira projects (one for the internal issues and one for the publicly visible ones), which I definitely would not recommend (that's how Atlassian does it and it obviously sucks for everybody), I can see how it will be a problem getting everything migrated into one project. I do not envy them this task.

 

However, the optics of dumping years of public issues will be catastrophic to their already strained relationship with the community. I really hope that they get this sorted out somehow.

[Uwe Raabe 1890]

23 minutes ago, Anders Melander said:

I can see how it will be a problem getting everything migrated into one project.

Actually QP ought to be a subsystem from the internal Jira. The InternalTrackingLink ist a hint for that. One of the reasons to make QP read-only is probably to allow for a final synchronize before moving the internal Jira to the new one.