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4fml's avatar
4fml
Occasional Contributor
2 years ago

Purpose of support tools for technical discussions, bugs, feature requests and more

Coming from the link to the new portal for Zephyr Scale ideas that Rache1 gave here https://community.smartbear.com/t5/Zephyr-Scale-Questions/Test-cycle-freeze-when-done-in-Zephyr-Scale/m-p/247480/emcs_t/S2h8ZW1haWx8dG9waWNfc3Vic2NyaXB0aW9ufExGTEdHUkxLWjhVMzhUfDI0NzQ4MHxTVUJTQ1JJUFRJT05TfGhL#M2443, I want to ask about the purpose of those tools because the multitude of platforms for talking to SmartBear support and placing/finding information is confusing me.

 

There is https://smartbear.atlassian.net/servicedesk which holds support requests. There I can only see my own tickets. I got comments from supporters with JQA-1234 tickets that I cannot see anywhere, so I cannot read what a supporter has written in that ticket, whether it has ever been started to work on or what its status is. Do these tickets still exist? How can I access them?

 

There was the possibility to send e-mails to support without logging in to the portal which I often made use of. That mail address jira@smartbear.atlassian.net does not seem to always be read or processed. Some requests to there have been unanswered for quite some time. In former times I received replies with ticket keys that were created. Yet, I do not remember (or can find) any information of that address being abandoned by SmartBear. What is the status of it?

 

The aha! portal seems to be no longer available. What happened to the links in there and their information?

 

Then there is the new https://community.smartbear.com/t5/Zephyr-Scale-Questions/bd-p/ZephyrScale . Its purpose seems to be to discuss questions and issues but once they turn into or refer to a ticket, this (external) information is no longer visible for participants, so it lacks transparency.

 

What is the strategy of separating all this information into different tools and creating barriers between them? With (at least some of) those platforms no longer being in use, the links not working any longer and no substitute being in place, it seems that a lot of information is not accessible any longer. Information about created tickets, bug reports, feature requests, their ticket or planning status. What happened to the tickets that have been created in various tools over the years? Is there a strategy for keeping this information together in the future, migrating them to one tool, visible for the customer, linked to each other so that it stays transparent in the long run and that the customers do not have to file the same issues again and again?

 

My summary and thus the basis for my confusion: customer bug reports, customer change requests, employee tickets - everything that should be under one hood is split across different tools with a lot of media breaks, isolated accounts and information. And as a funny side note: none of them is Jira, THE tool for incident tracking for which SmartBear develops and sells us add-ons 😕

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