Why bug correction and functionality changes are so slow?

[former_member186338]

To my mind it's because Community development team and Community team in general are not using SAP Community in their job.

Some examples:

thomas.grassl has only one question and one blog, no answers.

oliver has 26 blog posts (4 on the new Community), 22 answers, no questions.

Don't know other examples...

In order to understand the UI issues you need to post at least 100 replies per month.

To my mind it can be a good idea to introduce some tags (not visible globally) dedicated for the Community development team. And establish some processes that will require the Community usage (developer's questions, bug tracking, new functions discussion, documentation blogs etc).

P.S. May be the mentioned tags are already implemented and simply not visible? 🙂

[grassl]

You are absolutely correct the community platform itself is not actually part of my daily routine in terms of engagement but I'm looking at it from other ways of reporting including analytics which give me a good insight on what is going on. Having taken on the responsibility of community these last several weeks I feel that pain even more so now. Which is why just recently, in fact this week I brought together folks from Developer Relations who are actively working with the community to discuss and work with the IT and development team of the platform to drive down into the depth of the inner working of the community. Our goal was to start to find fast track possibilities and to better understand why some things are not happening as fast as everyone has been expecting.

It’s important to note though that this was only about the community platform, in parallel I’ve had the teams working on community as a topic in general and working to bring engagement back to the forefront, regardless of platform SAP and I are committed to community and engagement.

[former_member186338]

I agree that "analytics ... give ... a good insight on what is going on", but only daily platform usage will give you a real experience in the existing bugs and missing functionality. It will help to properly prioritize development (simple fixes first, strategy for required functionality etc)

Just look at my old blog with the most annoying issues: Answering Community questions – list of issues

[former_member186338]

P.S. One example from my old projects:
In 2011 after implementing SAP ERP we decided to use wiki-based documentation portal for users, developers and business analysts. One of the key requirements was the ability to directly paste screenshots with some minimal image editing (crop, blurring, text, etc). We asked our web developer to configure wiki server and to develop missing functionality for image paste. But we also ask him to prepare the documentation of wiki server configuration using this new wiki portal. Result: after one month the UI was perfectly tuned based on the user requirements because developer was also a user.

It's not possible to use this approach in all cases but I think that SAP Community is a good candidate.

[grassl]

We have an internal prioritization list of all request, and looking through it I found your input and recommendations in there. The new design update will address mostly the "tags issue" and narrowing it down to topics. So finding and staying on a topic vs. multiple tags will be improved. We are also looking into the Q&A and the feature and functions there, esp. from the usability to ensure it is more clear how to use the Questions and Answers. Priority for me and the team is to turn this around as quick as possible and to continuously deliver improvements vs. big planning and big releases.

[former_member186338]

I see now some activity with tags to topics process. Some parent tags were created at the beginning of March. And the parent tags are selectable as primary! The result you can see in my post: Strange new Tag: SAP Business Planning and Consolidation

[former_member186338 · Accepted solution]

It's not an answer, just to close this question! No changes at the end of August 2018.

[Jelena]

This is not an answer to the question but if I post it in a comment then no one will see it.

I have the same question: why is everything taking so long? E.g. this simple (as it appears to me) issue: reported in December, only fixed 3 months later. And why no one from SCN team noticed it by themselves? SCN is not part of my job but I open it at least every workday while drinking morning coffee. It only takes 5 minutes.

The teaser blog about the "redesign" has been posted in January, I think. Where is it? I'm skeptical it'll actually solve anything and the longer it takes the more likely it is just to fizzle but still - what's even the ETA?

"Too little too late" seems to be the motive since 2016...