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.

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?

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?

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.