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There is a special kind of optimism found only in software supplier helpdesks. Not that anyone often has a good word for internal or external ones these days. It is the optimism that says a problem affecting real users, doing real jobs, on a wet Tuesday afternoon, can be marked as “resolved” because a future software release might, possibly, allegedly, include something that sounds a bit like a fix. Not fixed now, OBVs. Not fixed in the version the customer is actually using. Not fixed in any way that stops Doris in rents, Ahmed in repairs, or Lisa in the contact centre from having to invent a daily workaround involving three browser tabs, a spreadsheet, and a quiet swear. But fixed in spirit. Fixed on the roadmap. Fixed in that wonderful fantasy kingdom where version 12.4.7 is coming soon, all known issues have vanished, and everyone lives happily ever after in a clean release note.
I do have some sympathy, because many years ago when on the supplier darkside I did a week each month on a software helpdesk myself, so I know the pressure to keep queues moving, manage expectations, stop calls festering, and keep the statistics looking vaguely respectable. But there is a world of difference between managing a ticket properly and making it disappear because the words “future release” have appeared in the supplier crystal ball. The customer logs a fault. The supplier investigates. Someone says, “Yes, that is a known issue.” Then, as if by magic, the ticket is closed because “this is addressed in a future roadmap release.” Lovely. Except the user is not living in a future release. They are living in today’s release, with today’s broken process, today’s complaint from a tenant, today’s arrears letter that did not generate properly, today’s repair order that won’t behave, or today’s report that produces the sort of numbers usually seen on a fruit machine.
Closing a ticket because a fix is promised later is a bit like a garage handing your car back with the brakes still dodgy and saying, “Don’t worry, the next model has improved braking.” That may be technically interesting, but it is not terribly helpful when you are already halfway down the hill. The future fix might arrive in three months. Or six. Or it might slip into the next release, miss ‘the sprint’ altogether. Or it might fix the problem for one customer configuration but not another. Or it might fix the obvious symptom while leaving the underlying daftness ( & data wibble ) untouched, like painting over damp/mould and calling it a housing regeneration strategy. And, of course, once the ticket is closed, the supplier’s statistics look better. Fewer open issues. Better resolution times. Tidier dashboard. A warm little glow in the service review pack. Meanwhile, back in the actual organisation, the workaround is still alive and well, staff are still wasting time, managers are still chasing, confidence in the system and supplier is still being slowly sanded down, and the customer has not received anything like a fix. They have received a promissory note with a version number on it.
There is a simple principle here. If the customer still experiences the problem, the issue is not closed. It may be linked to a future release. It may be awaiting development. It may have a target fix version. It may even have a workaround. But it is not resolved. Maybe suppliers need more honest ticket statuses, such as “awaiting customer confirmation of resolution” and “awaiting upgrade/bugfix application & customer confirmation of resolution”, so everyone can see the truth of where things actually stand. That would protect suppliers from endless duplicate tickets, but also protect customers from the nonsense of problems being quietly buried before anyone on the customer side has confirmed they have gone away.
A future release is not a fix. It is, at best, a hopeful promise. And as anyone who has worked in software for more than ten minutes knows, promises in release notes are sometimes like supplier demo dashboards: very shiny, very confident, and occasionally from the same broad family as fiction.
Related Post: Ever experienced a proper 24/7 international help desk?
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