Development and Testing
I test software for a living and we always have our developers get user experience. For example, they work in the production software program as a user for about 8 hours a week. This makes it so they understand the system better how it work and how the issues/bugs affect the people that use the system. I love that Family Search is free, but there are new bugs that show up almost daily. This seems strange as I thought the system was only updated once a week. I'm not sure why things that worked less then 24 hours ago are broken today. Our company releases new code and bug fixes about every two weeks not every day.
Also when we release new code we have a check list, which changes and expands as we develop the software. There are certain things that break a lot, so those should always be tested before a release. For example, over the last few years Family Search often has an issue with marriages saying they are non-standardized when they were brought over from a record and showed they were standardized when hitting save. This is a small issue that just causes more work for the user, but some things are much more frustrating.
For the last few month off and on (intermittent) peoples temple work has not been able to be reserved. There is not issue with the people, it is a bug in the system, that will not allow you to reserve them. Sometimes it won't allow you to get any of their work and sometimes it's just the sealing to spouse or sealing to parents.
Another thing is lessons learned could be documented. The 1900 census issue that has been mostly fixed seems like it would have been valuable in making the 1950 census release a success, but most of the 1950 census records are not working, see attached error.
I appreciate all of the hard work that everyone is doing to make Family Search a success, and I hope that these ideas can help it become even better.
Comments
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I am still struggling to retrieve my family history records I have already entered.
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@St. Smith, I've been doing QA for 25 years and working here for seven. FS doesn't even have a functional method of allowing end users to report bugs. I don't know if that's an issue with resourcing or just deep, deep dysfunction, but if they can't even get a user-facing JIRA instantiation going there's pretty much no hope of meaningful release documentation.
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@RTorchia, Thank you for your comment. I agree with what you said and hopefully some changes will be made in the future. A couple of years ago there use to be a way to email issues via the Family Search Help Center, but that is pretty much gone now. It wasn't for reporting bugs, but I did that anyway. I reported a few bugs, with reproduction steps and screen shots, and even got responses from the developers. They were not able to understand or figure out the issues though so I gave up. It must be frustrating and thank you for trying. 🙂
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