If you’re watching the Snipe-IT repo closely (which it’s totally fine if you aren’t – go be a normal person! Do normal people stuff!), you will have noticed some changes recently. Lots of older issues being closed, lots of them being resurfaced, lots of new categorizing of things, etc.
We’ve decided to try something new for us. It’s going to get weird, a little awkward, and it might not stick, but we want to try it anyway. Hold onto your butts.
TLDR;
All issues, internal and external are now going to be on Github. Our own internal ones we come across will be created there. Customers of course can (and should) contact us directly, but if it’s an actual bug, you’ll have a place to track it. If we create one on your behalf, we will redact anything identifiable, using only our local “dummy” data for screenshots. We will not reference you as a customer (though you are welcome to state that) – and in fact we have no way of knowing you’re a customer on GH. Milestones are a thing again.
The old way
As you might or might not know, we have eleventy-billion channels through which we get feedback and potential bug reports or feature requests. We have our support desk (for customers), but also our Discord, Github, Reddit, Bluesky, Mastodon, MacAdmins slack channel, and probably another fourteen I have forgotten about for the folks who don’t pay us (and sometimes customers show up there too, which is a little weird, but also cool.).
Sometimes people email me directly to my personal email, because that’s totally a thing a person should do. (It is not.)
For a long time, that “single pane of glass” we, as tech folk, have always longed for was Shortcut.
A big part of our job is to triage allllllll of that information from all of those different sources – and somehow unify it into a place where our team can actually address it in the order it should be addressed, if it should be addressed at all, make sure work isn’t being duplicated, make sure no one is blocked, etc etc etc.
Have we heard this issue before? It feels kinda familiar. Now we go search Github, Shortcut, Reddit, MacAdmins, etc just to determine whether or not this was already reported. I know I’ve heard that one before, but I can’t find it on Github, maybe it was Shortcut? Or maybe MacAdmins? Helpdesk maybe? Twitter?? What even is time?? what-year-is-it.gif
A customer issue would come through in Freshdesk (the helpdesk software we use until we write something better), it was confirmed by QA, it became a Shortcut issue – and depending on how urgent it was or wasn’t, it might make it to the “right now” pile or it might be sent into the /dev/null that is the backlog. (How we gauge priority/importance/urgency is probably another blog post.)
I didn’t mind that part exactly. The extra layer of nebulous “it’s been logged in our internal system.” Ew. But we needed to make sure that customer data never leaked out by accident to the public, so having that safety stop (for the SCUBA divers out there reading this) was good, but it also meant we had no way of showing whether or not something was being worked on, and what progress it might or might not have been made. Thirty years working in open source, I hated that part.
A layer of interference to make sure nothing private got accidentally leaked seemed very safe and good. Customer security will always be The Most Important part of what we do. I know every company says that on their website and they’re mostly full of shit, but we really mean it. For us, it’s deeply personal.
So every Monday, we’d go through the new issues in Shortcut. Our dev meetings were boring, but it was at least some way to unify everyone on the product front as we start our week.
What are we going to get done for the next release (or sometimes, “Oh crap, what did we break and how quickly can we fix it??”) No blame, just figuring out who is best equipped to address it the fastest. Who touched it last and could potentially be the best qualified to handle this quickly?
It also meant that our devs didn’t always know how to start their day or their week – having to check 5 different places before your morning coffee is even done brewing is a lot.
I tried to synthesize all of that information from all these different channels, and put them into Shortcut. And it kinda worked. Kinda. But I also deeply believe in working in public. It’s in our very bones, the DNA of this company. And telling a customer that it’s been logged on our internal bug tracking system (where they cannot see updates, cannot add to the discussion, etc) always felt kinda gross and wrong.
And it just wasn’t working. All the time I put in, organizing, collecting, tagging – it still wasn’t working. We weren’t getting the results we needed, and I think our devs weren’t super happy either.
We are a small team of ninja attack devs. I’m incredibly proud of everyone we have on staff (and the amazing open source contributors that we are so grateful to have). They are all monsters in the best possible way, but that’s just too many places for people to look for stuff and figure out what’s the most important thing they should be working on and plan their day, which leads to uncertainty within our own team – and that well and truly sucks for us as an organization and for them individually. Every single one of them wants to solve all of your problems. Telling them they can’t is one of the harder parts of this job.
The New Way
We’ve always been fast to ship (usually a new point release every 2-3 weeks, because why withhold fixes and features for an arbitrary date?), but we didn’t have a great way of communicating milestones and roadmaps, so on the outside looking in, it probably looked like a chaos engine. It really wasn’t (okay it kind of is, but that’s open source for you), it was a lot more boring than that, but we didn’t have a way to tell you that. Now we do.
So we (I, really – I take full responsibility if this ends up going badly – if it works out great, it’s “we”) decided to go all-in on Github issues and milestones. Maybe the roadmap feature in a month or two – it’s a little weird and clunky, but we’ll try it. We’ll suck at it, and then get better at it, or let it go.
This isn’t a single pane of glass. Thirty years in, I can tell you, that doesn’t exist. But working more in public, and having one fewer place to look for issues means our team can work faster and smarter and can coordinate better.
Something comes into the helpdesk (or any of the other channels) we write it up immediately as a Github issue (after QA confirms it’s reproducible and not a data issue) – unless it’s a security issue, which should go to security@snipeitapp.com where it will get immediate attention.
If you spoke to us personally via any of the aforementioned channels, we’ll give you the link so you can follow any discussions and progress. If you’re a customer, the only thing that changes is that you now have a link you can subscribe to for updates. We’ll use our own local reproduction of the issue for screenshots so your data with us remains safe.
The upcoming mobile app will be included in the project view once the source for that is made public. Milestone names may change based on how this really all shakes out. Lots of unknowns, but we’ll try to explain as we go.
Every morning, I start my day by looking at, responding to, and classifying the nature of the newly opened issue. If I think we can make it into a milestone, I’ll put it there. If I’m not sure (because maybe it’s large) I will do… I don’t know yet to be honest. It will go somewhere. This is new and big and a little scary, but I also think it’s going to work out really well for everyone. Us and you. The very best kind of win.
We’re not always great at communicating it, but we’re always on your side, and we’re working on getting better at coms.
Have a wonderful week!
Alison Gianotto
CEO and some other stuff
