I have received some reports of these replies being off-topic. I do not agree that we should ban concerns, but I do agree that it is neither the place nor the way that could bring up to any constructive dialog.
In any projects I had experience working with there is always this choice between working on fixes, designing new features (or like here – new formats) and doing some refactoring, for example to improve the performance, security etc. I believe Checkmk to be no different here – the work of our developers’ team (and other teams of course) consists of different things – including fixes and new features/ formats/ you name it. Unfortunately, the developers’ resources are not unlimited – and some things get prioritised over others. And we might try some ways to build better communication around it.
I do not believe though that this SaaS solution here is the case. I have a couple of reasons for that:
- This SaaS solution will be based on the same Checkmk – meaning that most part of the development of the SaaS solution (and fixing its bugs, and improving it) will also be reflected in the main code of Checkmk. The idea behind SaaS is that we will operate Checkmk ourselves, meaning that we will be even more aware of all the issues quicker, and based on what I know, a lot of work of the SaaS teams already consists on looking into improving the existent Checkmk.
- This research is being done by people whose sole purpose is to come up with new ideas and features – not to create more bugs but to stay on track with all the modern world requirements. The IT world is super fast-changing and even to stay at the same place you have to move with new ideas pretty quickly
I see that this is a presentation of a deeper issue than just one new feature. From my side, I will try in the beginning of the year to organise a way to communicate the concern with the stakeholders teams. In the last year we’ve come a long way in the way we communicate with the community – for example, changes in how code contributions are processed on GitHub, the new Feature Portal and others. As far as I know – we also made the QA team stronger. Fixing bugs is not a hot topic to talk about though.
The support model is something that we also want to have improved in the future. I believe we can find a way to better communicate this too.
Maybe my colleagues will have something else to say after the holidays as well.
Do you think if I create a special topic to voice concerns, we could discuss it in a more constructive way? I would gladly do that (unfortunately, it might need to wait a little as we are very close to Christmas holidays, but I would definitely do that – to be able to find a better way to work together).