Atlassian's bug fix policy, a bizarre policy when applied to EAPs such as Databases

[Filip Callewaert]

Earlier I reported a bug in this group here that creates parallel draft pages when automation rules and metadata handling through C.Databases are combined. This was also reported as a bug through Atlassian's support desk: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AUTO-980

I'm quite surprised to see the status "low" as this bug has a huge impact. Interesting then to read Atlassian's bug fix policy.

Mind that Databases is still in its EAP - so you just cannot use the (low) number of bug reports as parameter to define priority. I see it as a relative number: I have 3 clients now with whom I introduced databases, and in which I see the exact same behaviour as is mentioned above. That is 3/3 in my world, which is 100% coverage, which is 100% chance that this behaviour will happen in other sites too. Atlassian replicates this bug without any problem. 

Then, mind what happens in real contexts: all authors that manipulate pages start creating ghost draft pages that they in no way can delete. So every author sees this strange behaviour that impacts the most basic handling in Confluence: editing pages. That's not just one author, it's a coverage of 100%. Hail the helpdesk. And it is still getting worse: only the author sees these draft pages, so every author is creating a private chaotic information world that cannot be cleaned up by any outstander/admin. So a negative exponential spiral of misery is being developed.

Reasons enough to call this an issue with a very high priority: it confuses and hinders authors in their very basic action of editing pages and creates debris that, the longer you wait, the exponentially more rework needs to be performed.

It certainly is not one of those typically smaller paper cuts such as cosmetic errors, or non-critical functionality not behaving as expected. This is very serious.

[Matthew Machuca]

Hey @Filip Callewaert 

Really appreciate you re-raising this, and we always appreciate your activity in the community! I understand this bug has caused you and other customers issues. 

I have spoke with the team and we have prioritized looking into this, this week. I totally recognize that this is a high priority issue, I want to apologize that it's taken this long to get it looked into.

Thanks,

Matthew

[Filip Callewaert]

Thanks, @Matthew Machuca , I really appreciate this!

[Hendrik Hillus]

Agreed. This is "punishing" the most active of our users.

[Filip Callewaert]

@Matthew Machuca , @Caio Oliveira did a great job in researching this behaviour, and found that it is not related to databases, but to the page status. Moving a page and changing the status afterwards, creates this ghost draft page!

[Matthew Machuca]

Yes! I was reviewing some of the internal chatter around this issue, and it's been raised across teams as, like you mentioned it isn't database specific.