Issue #2 - No Release Notes
Issue #2 is closely related to issue #1. Again after months of frustration in observing what appeared to be complete apathy or ineptitude with the issues I reported & associated tickets opened, I sent another email to StackSports in reply to a customer satisfaction email request they dared to send me.
I let them know how disappointed I was.
Nicely, I was contacted quickly by an employee who said his job is to take feedback like mine and take good notes to their management team in an effort to be in-tune with customers.
He seemed very genuine and opened several tickets on my behalf and did take the issues up to his management team.
One of the issues I requested was release notes. The vast majority of SaaS products publish release notes with each Sprint in their Agile Development process. There is no shortage of SaaS products providing release notes. I even emailed him release notes for a few SaaS products I use at work to provide some very nice (and simple) examples.
He acknowledged it was a great idea and appreciated my examples. But unfortunately after 1-2 weeks returned via email with the bad news that his management team had decided they are not going to implement release notes at this time.
Personally this comes back to the issue of what seems to be a fairly stagnant product not receiving the development resources required to fix its defects (not to mention add new features to make it more efficient, etc).
Again, if it didn't seem like nothing was happening behind the curtain, this wouldn't be a big deal to me. But when I use the product daily for months and don't notice any improvements to the bugs I've reported (and regularly encounter), nor have any regular communication from the company on the status of these bugs, then with the absence of release notes, I kind of have to assume nothing is happening.
https://stacksportsportal.force.com/customersupport/s/article-search?p=Club+and+League+Connect+Release+Notes&q=
That is a huge plus.
But on the flip side, this kind of confirms what has already seemed apparent. They are pretty inactive in putting development resources toward fixing bugs or adding features. If that were not the case, they would be publishing release notes a lot more often than 2x per year. Especially when they use the word "sprints" in their notes. That term is a part of the agile development model, in which the philosophy is that you do more frequent minor releases to your software/SaaS, rather than the old traditional model of 1 big update per year. In this case, it seems they're doing neither.
Regardless, I am grateful they are finally publishing any type of release notes, and I hope they will continue to do this with greater frequency and transparency.
I let them know how disappointed I was.
Nicely, I was contacted quickly by an employee who said his job is to take feedback like mine and take good notes to their management team in an effort to be in-tune with customers.
He seemed very genuine and opened several tickets on my behalf and did take the issues up to his management team.
One of the issues I requested was release notes. The vast majority of SaaS products publish release notes with each Sprint in their Agile Development process. There is no shortage of SaaS products providing release notes. I even emailed him release notes for a few SaaS products I use at work to provide some very nice (and simple) examples.
He acknowledged it was a great idea and appreciated my examples. But unfortunately after 1-2 weeks returned via email with the bad news that his management team had decided they are not going to implement release notes at this time.
Personally this comes back to the issue of what seems to be a fairly stagnant product not receiving the development resources required to fix its defects (not to mention add new features to make it more efficient, etc).
Again, if it didn't seem like nothing was happening behind the curtain, this wouldn't be a big deal to me. But when I use the product daily for months and don't notice any improvements to the bugs I've reported (and regularly encounter), nor have any regular communication from the company on the status of these bugs, then with the absence of release notes, I kind of have to assume nothing is happening.
Edit (2/28/2018):
There are now release notes:https://stacksportsportal.force.com/customersupport/s/article-search?p=Club+and+League+Connect+Release+Notes&q=
That is a huge plus.
But on the flip side, this kind of confirms what has already seemed apparent. They are pretty inactive in putting development resources toward fixing bugs or adding features. If that were not the case, they would be publishing release notes a lot more often than 2x per year. Especially when they use the word "sprints" in their notes. That term is a part of the agile development model, in which the philosophy is that you do more frequent minor releases to your software/SaaS, rather than the old traditional model of 1 big update per year. In this case, it seems they're doing neither.
Regardless, I am grateful they are finally publishing any type of release notes, and I hope they will continue to do this with greater frequency and transparency.
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