Yes I was referring to your last comment on the other thread. I only realised afterwards that it was you I was responding to in this topic!
Actually its not relevant whether its a bug - the fact of the matter is, updates do affect the end user especially when everything changes and having a focus group to iron out all the niggles does eliminate all the frustrations of end users in that you can present the finished article rather than a work in progress.
I can recall a number of occasions when updates were rolled out - two occasions when the updates had to be reversed as a result of feedback - for example the ability to name the business files and save them anywhere, not just application data and there was the issue of server users being forced to have only one business open at a time - this was reversed as well. These two examples would not have occured if there was a focus group providing feedback.
Also I will refer you to this topic - Feedback on New Summary Page Look
This change got a lot of complaints and it was purely down to the fact that it was released in beta mode and it took several weeks/months before all the issues with this was fixed. Again, the issues were not bug related, but were user friendly navigation issues as things that were easy to do yesterday, required more clicks and more navigation to do today. The problem was not the update, but that it was not released as a finished article but rather as a work in progress.
Another example is when the pdf printer button was introduced, Lubos removed the original print button - Could you please test new "Print" button? - see post 18 by Jon and this affected a lot of users who urgently needed to print, but could no longer do so because the new pdf button was not working correctly at the time.
Another example that I could provide is with the Managing inventory and tracking items to be invoiced and you could look at Sarika’s posts in [17.6.10] More clarity under Inventory Items tab - we both have the same problem with electronic inventory and this again is because there is no focus group to provide feedback on the Delivery Notes update etc. I don’t see the logic of a delivery note for electronic inventory as I put the serial numbers on the invoice and download links in the email and there were a lot of issues with that update - I think that Lubos had some very good points in the release as it was about making the delivery note more useful than just emailing the client a delivery note - the problem I have is with the execution of the updates.
An update does not have to have a bug in it to cause problems. The purpose of a focus group is to provide feedback of how changes affect their usage of the program, because everyone uses the program for different types of businesses and different ways of doing things. I have listed some examples above, but the reality is that a lot of updates are released about 80%-90% complete and are tweaked after release.
I don’t want to derail this topic any further, but I just wanted to answer your post and highligh some examples (and these are not the only examples) of why a focus group is needed to review updates and provide feedback on how these changes affect end users. I just see the same mistake being made repeatedly - an update is released and a dozen users chime in with issues they are encountering and its very stressful for the developer and end users to get everything operational again etc and its so unecessary - this problem could be eliminated with a focus group that tests the changes and comes back with feedback on what they think. At the moment the focus group is everyone who upgrades immediately on a new release and then they end up getting frustrated as something that was simple to do yesterday is made ten times more difficult as illustrated in the example by Sabrina in the 3 banking tabs update.
I think that Lubos has a very good program, but I think that he keeps making the same mistake over and over again of releasing an update and then frantically fixing and tweaking the update in the new few weeks to address feedback and user complaints because he has made the public his focus group instead of limiting it to a small number of users who would be only to happy to help him improve the program - I certainly would be happy to help. These updates should not be released live, they are not production updates, they are beta updates and I would not be surprised if some people like Jon have left Manager for this precise reason.
I think the issue is that you don’t realise that the public is the focus group - I just propose making the focus group smaller and limited to people who would like to help improve the program by providing feedback on updates.