As a bug reporter, it is currently too hard to know when a bug report is actively being addressed. Currently, a bug report’s progress can be tracked by viewing a filing confirmation, replies by engineer(s), and its status (Open, Need Information, Fixed, or Closed). However, from my experience, engineers mostly reply if an issue has a major impact or when an issue is resolved; Sometimes an engineer doesn’t reply to a report at all. Additionally, most bug reports are marked as “Open” which conveys little of their progress.
Either an “In Progress” status needs to be added or communication on progress for bug reports needs to be greatly improved. Here are 2 good examples of reports whose progress has lacked transparency:
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my experience reporting bugs by (1) knowing if an issue is actively being addressed, (2) not having to bump a report for an update as much, and (3) not having to periodically try to reproduce an issue to check if it has been resolved.
Thanks for the feedback! We’ll look into how we can do better here.
FYI, both tickets have recent activity internally in the last month (mostly, trying to figure out the right engineer to own the issue and look into it).
It’s not always possible to 1:1 map everything that happens internally to external world since we can’t account for every single kind of human operation on a task but we’ll see what can be improved.
Yes “in progress” state is an interesting idea we’re thinking about, just need to make sure it doesn’t give false promises to show this to users since different engineering teams have different workflows internally.
I’m sorry to bump, but I just thought of another idea: Would it be possible to have an “In queue: #” for bug reports? Once a report reaches the front of the queue, then its status could be changed to “In Progress”. Of course, the queue # for a report could change as new reports are filed that have a higher impact, but it would still provide a rough estimated wait time for a report to be addressed. Maybe there’s already a similar system for tickets in the internal database.
Sorry but this does not correspond with how people internally work on bugs. At Roblox each engineering team decides its own workflow for handling issues and there is no feasible way to assert this kind of time estimation mechanism across all teams. It’s not feasible to predict when an issue might exactly be worked on, it depends on what else is on that team’s plate and how they prioritize your bug.
I don’t know if this belongs here but it does relate to bug reports and their status.
Sometimes bug reports seem to just get lost, even after months or years of them existing and some being bumped, there is no indication that any ticket has been filed, or that any work is going to be done on them. Is this something that could be brought up alongside bug report status/progress?
If it’s easier to track if I make a separate thread, or if this qualifies as a bug let me know and I’ll file a separate report, I just felt like this sorta belonged here
The first issue is too old to be in our new system. We’re going to do a historical triage of issues older than 2020 at some point. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Some issues from before 2020 were ingested based on popularity and recent activity. This one did not make the cut at that time.
For the other two issues unfortunately there is no more information on the internal tickets than is on the threads, so they are as transparent as they can be based on info in internal system. I’ll ask to have them looked at by the assigned engineers.
If this is actively blocking you from doing something right now you could re-file it, but I can’t guarantee it will be looked at faster via that route.