Why is Zimbra so buggy?

[rharms]

Originally Posted by phoenix

If you're expecting bugs to be resolved immediately you report them then that's not what happens, they will go through triage, an assessment of the severity will be made and then will be targeted for a particular release - it is part of the normal development cycle for the product.

I don't have the expectation that they would be fixed immediately, though that certainly could be implied from my original message. With Zimbra doing point releases of the product every 1-2 months, I would hope the turnaround would be within 2-3 months, but at this point, there's not even a target milestone set on them. With one of them marked "P1 / major," and targeted for Helix, seeing the other minor ones without that even is disheartening.

I am still a huge fan of Zimbra - I'd used the open source version for years before committing to the NE at our business, but the transition from Exchange has been more painful than I ever imagined. We'll take some responsibility for that, too - using parent/child accounts were a last minute decision, and the feature just wasn't solid enough and we didn't realize that at the time. But there's other items like 35126 that really seem like something that should've been caught during testing.

Rich

[edwin.arneson]

Originally Posted by phoenix

triage

Not mere prioritization, but full blown triage?
Does that suggest that the Zimbra bug situation is a disaster?

[rharms]

Originally Posted by edwin.arneson

Not mere prioritization, but full blown triage?
Does that suggest that the Zimbra bug situation is a disaster?

What struck me, as someone who is a customer of other software companies (our ERP software would be an example), is that the support issue was closed without resolution of the problems (either a targeted version or a date would be good). That immediately created a very negative view of the entire situation for me and my company - and toss in a survey that expired in 7 days, leaving us with no ability to leave feedback. Closing the ticket and saying "Development and fixing will take its own course of time." is just not acceptable if you want businesses to continue to adopt this product.

And to respond to a suggestion we contact an account manager, we tried to contact the one we worked with for the purchase. Never received a response.

Rich

[Rich Graves]

Does your ERP software vendor Cc you in the same bug database that their developers use? That can be more valuable.

I've had some really long waits too -- my Bug 32536 – Zimbra too trusting of MIME-type sent by client really dates from March 2008 (it took two months to realize what the actual problem was) and is due to be addressed in 5.0.16 any day now -- but I understand that my issues aren't the only issues.

Making sure that your issue is tagged with your support case number (they don't always do that) and (as appropriate) lobbying for votes here do help.

32536 took a long time because it's really a Mozilla bug, not a Zimbra bug, and figuring out how to work around it safely is nontrivial. I don't know about your bugs.

[fcash]

Interesting bug lists ... but impossible to read.

Could you spend some time formatting them into proper lists, with proper spacing, punctuation, etc? Was really looking forward to seeing which (if any) of these correspond to things we've noticed (and entered as bugs) ... but it's all just a big splat text with nothing to differentiate anything from anything.

[nrc]

Most companies will not tie a customer trouble ticket to a bug report with any promise of a time frame for resolution. "We've identified this as a bug which will be fixed in an upcoming release" is the typical "resolution" to their trouble ticket. For most of them you don't even have any real way of knowing whether your bug has been documented in a way that will impact development, let alone being able to track its status.

During the year that we've been using Zimbra, almost all of the bugs and many of the RFEs that I've reported or voted for have been resolved. That's somewhere around a third of the issues I've voted for all told. Maybe if you were reporting these bugs instead of just collecting them you would be seeing similar progress.

[fcash]

Our experience has been similar. We did a test pilot of 5.0.0 (starting with RC1 through GA) way back when. During the pilot, a bunch of issues were found and filed as bugs. We also found bug entries that corresponded to issues we were having, so we added comments to those bugs, and voted for them.

After the pilot, we decided not to go with Zimbra. That was about a year ago. Yesterday, I logged into bugzilla as we are againg piloting Zimbra, and over half of the bugs we voted for were marked as complete.

If you aren't willing to spend the time documenting issues and entering bugs and participating in the resolution process, then you really can't complain.

[nrc]

Originally Posted by fcash

Interesting bug lists ... but impossible to read.

Could you spend some time formatting them into proper lists, with proper spacing, punctuation, etc? Was really looking forward to seeing which (if any) of these correspond to things we've noticed (and entered as bugs) ... but it's all just a big splat text with nothing to differentiate anything from anything.

Reformatting isn't going to get any of these resolved unless someone bothers to enter them in bugzilla.

[Bill Brock]

after spending their money on a product, any product whether it is software, hardware, the appliances in your house, your car, or any other product one has purchased, don't feel they should have to spend their time and efforts debugging that product. They just expect it to work as advertised.

Somehow, the software industry has been trying to convince their customers that it is their duty to help debug something they have spent their hard earned money on. It doesn't work this way in any other industry and it is a shame the software industry can get by with forcing additional costs in the form of time spent on their customers. Especially when the customer has purchased a support contract.

Some IT people enjoy going through the forum process. But most don't.

I use the FOSS version so I don't say much about this ridiculous process. The couple of bugs I have posted haven't been fixed. One has to be at least a year old. Plus the last two posts I made regarding issues were not even answered.

I definitely would not pay for a product with as many unresolved bugs as Zimbra has plus the hoops you have to jump through to get anything resolved. For a free product it is OK. But there is not one feature in Zimbra that operates as claimed without some kind of glitch or another.

I like Zimbra. But for me, its functionality doesn't go much past a basic E-mail program. Everything else I have tried to use (especially the documents) has bugs that make them not good for business usage.

Of all the paid mailboxes bragged about I wonder how many are hard core business mail boxes and how many are simply used for E-mail.

[edwin.arneson]

Originally Posted by fcash

Interesting bug lists ... but impossible to read.

Could you spend some time formatting them into proper lists, with proper spacing, punctuation, etc?

I'm not sure to what you are referring. Each numbered item is one or more related issues in 1 paragraph. Written in English and properly punctuated; though sometimes correct grammar is sacrificed for brevity. (Not guaranteed to be error free since, like Zimbra, there's been no QA. )