An Update on Bug Reporting, Part 1

Bug reporting and EVE have a long and amazing history. The first bug reports were filed on 15th November 2003 as a test to the system.  The first player filed bug report that we found was bug report 62, filed on the 26th October 2003 and was to do with a large amount of Amarr Navy occupying CONCORD controlled Yulai, making things very difficult for Minmatar mission runners! Since that day, the EVE community has been vigilant in reporting issues they find to us, and has filed just over 150,000 bug reports over the last 10 years as EVE has evolved with rewritten code, hardware changes and other such progressions. While yes, many of those were duplicates, we still value how much you care. Needless to say, we couldn't handle this kind of volume on our own, while still being able to make the features you all love so much, and the ISD division of Bug Hunters have worked tirelessly in assisting us in processing and reproducing the reports, and gathering more information from those who filed them. The whole picture is truly remarkable and humbling, and we thank you all for helping to make EVE better by your efforts.

Last week the EVE project changed defect tracking systems.  We moved from our proprietary system DT2, to Atlassian‘s Jira.  This will give us better synergy with our volunteer Bug Hunters, as they will now be in the same system as developers, and also gives us better metrics and reporting on defects so we can prioritise them more efficiently and see which areas of the game really need more love.  This relates to you in a couple of ways.

Firstly, the existing bug reporting site will be no longer be used to collect EVE bug reports.  It didn‘t fit with our modern web presence, so our wonderful web team Roundhouse Kick are redesigning new pages from scratch to be a better tool for players that want to let us know about issues they encounter.  As a consequence of this, we will also be disabling the In Game Bug Reporter (IGBR) located in the Help menu, until Team Superfriends has it ready to work with our new system.  This all means that we will effectively be „going dark“ on bug reports for a couple of weeks, meaning that any reports that you create before we go live with the new solutions, will not be processed.  We are not pushing out too many updates to EVE over the next few weeks, and don‘t anticipate many new issues arising.  That being said, you can always use the Issues forum to let us know if something crops up.  Once again please note that any bug reports that you create, from now until we launch the new bug reporting solutions, will not be processed.

Development of the new web pages and the updated IGBR is underway and progressing smoothly.  Some benefits to the new versions will be:

• Integration of bug reporting into the Support section of the Community website, so you won‘t need to log into a different website to report issues.
• Streamlined categories with explanations and examples of the areas of the game they belong to.
• Example text for each input field required, so you know what kind of information we‘re looking for to reproduce your issue.

There will be some features from the previous version that won‘t be available on launch. EVE needed to move between defect tracking systems faster than the new web pages and IGBR could be ready, so we decided to get the core functionality – the ability to report issues – out first, and have the rest of the features follow in iterations.  Most importantly, this means there will be no two way communication between you and the person dealing with your bug report at launch. In the previous version, we could contact you through the bug reporting site, that functionality will be added to the new web pages in the next iteration of this feature.

Thanks for reading. We hope you tune in for part 2, which will show off the new web pages and updated IGBR in all their glory!