Agriya’s New Bug Tracker Goes Live
Ah bugs. There’s an old programmer saying (cira 1944 when people first started programming machines) that goes “If you build it, it will have bugs”. No one likes bugs in the system, least of all you guys, our customers. Our own developers don’t like bugs either because they get shouted at by the support staff who have to fix any bugs and by the sales team who have to handle the customers bug complaints.
We do have a testing team who’s job it is to find bugs and script problems before the software goes live and sometimes the atmosphere between the programmers and testers can get a little bit icey, like the graphic below demonstrates!
Agriya are constantly reviewing our support processes and product iterations and a few months back we decided to take some inspiration from the open source community and open up our bug tracking to the community and give our customers a centralized point where they can report any bugs or defects with our products.
By crowdsourcing our bug hunting in this way we hope to have a more efficient system where we can locate, reproduce and ultimately fix any bug our products may contain. Crowdsourcing provides the best way to hunt for bugs because although our testing team can identify the major problems and we can release software without any known bugs it’s only when it gets in to the hands of the people that we find all those tiny little bugs. Agriya can never reproduce every scenario which is why it makes sense to have our users or people reviewing our product help us out to produce rock solid and secure products.
For any of the geeks out there reading this, Agriya has adapted the open source Mantis bug tracking software (we’ve been using Mantis internally since Day 1 and absolutely love it!) and given it a very polished interface to make it super simple for anyone to report a bug or suggest a feature upgrade.
If you are a customer of Agriya then you will be able to see all the bugs that have been tracked along with the features that have been requested. You will be able to see the kind of bug, a description of the bug and the status of the bug report. This should give you much more transparency in to the development processes we use here in Agriya and we are very hopeful that it will lead to even better products in the future.
We also should point out that the bug tracker is not a support desk, it doesn’t facilitate two way conversation between the customer and developer so if you need regular customer support please continue to post your issues in the support desk.
Before you submit any bugs we would like you to take a moment to read our “How to submit a bug” article which hopefully gives a bit more insight in to what you should submit and how you should submit it. When you are ready to submit a report (you don’t have to be a customer!) simply navigate to the correct product in customers.agriya.com and in the sub-menu area you’ll see the option to submit a bug.
As you can probably see, Agriya are consolidating a lot of departments under our customers.agriya.com website, we successfully migrated the customer support desk to be more integrated, we’ve introduced the Ideas concept from FundProjectsWith.me and now we’ve added a bug tracker. We’ve still got plenty more exciting features to add such as a new customer support forum based on our Discuzz software and one or two secret updates that we’re sure you’ll absolutely love!
If you’ve got any thoughts on how we can make the customers area serve you better give us a buzz or submit a comment using the form below.
Is Open Source a Force No Longer?
MySQL in many ways, exemplifies the spirit of open source, the crusade for freedom of knowledge, where a talented programmer comes up with a useful piece of software, and releases it to the world to use and modify at no obligation. MySQL was the first product of a particular fledgling venture; the database application was an instant hit, and talented software professionals contributed to its code, extending its function base and its stability, often doing it for no greater reward than a chance to hit back at Microsoft and Oracle. MySQL is installed on millions of computers worldwide; still, the founders never got anyone to pay for the non-free version that offered the additional benefit of customer support. MySQL later sold itself to Sun, and now Sun is being absorbed by Oracle. The European Commission does not like it at all seeing such a socially useful product disappear into a multinational corporation.
MySQL may be a great product that helps society; many examples of software exist, Facebook and Firefox being good ones, that society could not do without. But putting a figure on their financial value would be difficult. In today’s tough economic environment a part of the world’s businesses would close down if they did not have access to a good free alternative: Linux instead of Windows, OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office and so on. MySQL’s new owner, Oracle, promises to keep MySQL free, and to keep developing it, if only as a way to keep Microsoft’s SQL Server from getting any market traction. Does open source software have any intrinsic financial worth though, when it isn’t being used as a pawn in a business game? Red Hat is the one and only example of profitable open-source.
But open source is taking on corporate shades these days much more quickly than it has been taking on populist shades. It is not grassroots programmer contributions and popular use by everyday folk that is propping up Mozilla and Linux these days; it is Google, Oracle, Intel and IBM. These mega corporations pay the programmers and managers at these open source ventures the best salaries to keep them interested. In many cases they’re buying the open source ventures outright. It would appear that the open source movement has almost completely failed or disappeared. They don’t run on mere goodwill. Could it have been the plan all along that the major corporations, that they could buy up the open sourcers and then quietly phase them out?
Is Open Source a Force No Longer?
MySQL in many ways, exemplifies the spirit of open source, the crusade for freedom of knowledge, where a talented programmer comes up with a useful piece of software, and releases it to the world to use and modify at no obligation. MySQL was the first product of a particular fledgling venture; the database application was an instant hit, and talented software professionals contributed to its code, extending its function base and its stability, often doing it for no greater reward than a chance to hit back at Microsoft and Oracle. MySQL is installed on millions of computers worldwide; still, the founders never asked anyone to pay for the non-free version that offered the additional benefit of customer support. MySQL later sold itself to Sun, and now Sun is being absorbed by Oracle. The European Commission does not like it at all seeing such a socially useful product disappear into a multinational corporation.MySQL may be a great product that helps society; many examples of software exist, Facebook and Firefox being good ones, that society could not do without. But putting a figure on their financial value would be difficult. In today’s tough economic environment a part of the world’s businesses would close down if they did not have access to a good free alternative: Linux instead of Windows, OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office and so on. MySQL’s new owner, Oracle, promises to keep MySQL free, and to keep developing it, if only as a way to keep Microsoft’s SQL Server from getting any market traction. Does open source software have any intrinsic financial worth though, when it isn’t being used as a pawn in a business game? Red Hat is the one and only example of profitable open-source.
But open source is taking on corporate shades these days much more quickly than it has been taking on populist shades. It is not grassroots programmer contributions and popular use by everyday folk that is propping up Mozilla and Linux these days; it is Google, Oracle, Intel and IBM. These mega corporations pay the programmers and managers at these open source ventures the best salaries to keep them interested. In many cases they’re buying the open source ventures outright. It would appear that the open source movement has almost completely failed or disappeared. They don’t run on mere goodwill. Could it have been the plan all along that the major corporations, that they could buy up the open sourcers and then quietly phase them out?
Malware Kits are Going Open Source
Viruses and Trojans are no longer malicious attacks perpetrated by pimply faced geek hackers for giggles and thrills. Malware has become a big business. Most malware is now written for the explicit purpose of capturing and selling the personal and financial data of the millions of users on the Internet and is becoming increasingly sophisticated.
Emails with links to infected files are old hat, most infections these days occur when malicious software is automatically downloaded to user computers without their knowledge while browsing infected websites. Often malware is disguised as legitimate software / security updates and people are misled by messages via Facebook, etc into downloading them. These techniques are causing an exponential growth in infection according to RSA, a leading security company. The security firm detected 19,102 Trojan infections in August 2009 as against only 613 Trojan infections in August 2008.
As the complexity of design increases most criminals find that they do not have the technical skills to write their own malware and turn to Do-It-Yourself kits that contain everything needed for writing Viruses and Trojans for those who don’t have the know how to write their own.
A top notch malware kit can be worth a lot of money. The Limbo Trojan kit sold for about $350 at the peak of its popularity and the Zeus Trojan kit, which currently dominates the market sells for anywhere between $1,000 to $3,000. However, the dominance and popularity of a kit rarely lasts long as security companies soon fight back by trying to decipher the code and create general heuristic detection routines for anything created using the kit.
Some of the kit makers with waning popularity are trying to stay alive by releasing their source code. By giving free access to criminal developers to their code they can get a huge pool of talent working on their code and adding and improving features. Of course, the flip side is that the security companies also get their hands on the code making it easier for them to create detection routines.
Related Posts from the Past:
Categories
- Agriya Events (6)
- Agriya Ideas (3)
- Agriya News (102)
- Anova (11)
- Burrow (5)
- BuySell (3)
- Channel (6)
- Client Interviews (1)
- Computer Security (7)
- Crowdsourcing (1)
- Developers (2)
- Extensions (1)
- Feedy (1)
- FP Platform (9)
- GroupDeal (9)
- GroupWithUs (1)
- Holidays (1)
- internet (16)
- Internet News (57)
- iSocial (8)
- latest technology (21)
- Life @ Agriya (1)
- online marketing (15)
- PartyPlanet (1)
- search engines (8)
- SEO Game (18)
- SF Platform (1)
- Social Media News (17)
- social networking (43)
- Volume (3)
- Web 2.0 (8)
- web design (6)
- Webmaster Articles (113)
Archives
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
Page optimized by WP Minify WordPress Plugin