buy-something team mailing list archive

[Michael Vogt <mvo@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 07:32:05PM +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
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> Today, for the first time, I successfully completed the software
> purchase process from start to finish.

Thanks for the screencast and the detailed testing and reporting of
the bugs.

> It's still ugly and impolite. 
[..]

I think this is rather unfair. The screenshot shows that there are
flaws and bugs, but using terms like this is not the right approach to
help fixing them. Maybe this is a case of cultural differences, but to
me this as the opening sentence feels "ugly and impolite".

> This is important. We who are involved in
> this project are, justifiably, impressed at all the moving parts we have
> managed to plug together. But the simple truth is that
> *no-one outside the company will be*. They are used to an Internet where
> Amazon, iTunes, and tens of thousands of other stores sell things
> elegantly and (mostly) without fuss, and we'll be compared to them.
[..]

Compareing against them is problematic, iTunes has almost 10 years and
amazon.com ~15year. I know that no customer will care about that, but
I wanted to mention it anyway to put the remark into perspective.

There are only a couple of days left to fix bugs in the client. We can
fix a lot in this time, but we can't fix all. We are more flexilbe on
the server fortunately.

If you feel like the system is not ready, then there is little we can
do other then either "fix as much as we can and ship it" or "postpone
it and wait another 6 month to polish it". We can not delay the
relase, we can not add more hours to the day.

I think we pulled a lot off in a short amount of time accross multiple
teams. This is something to be proud off.

Don't get me wrong, I value your constructive feedback, but I don't
value when bugs become attributes like "ugly" or "impolite" - they are
bugs, not less but no more.


Michael