No tracking mechanism for TKLX community to record that appliances are working for them

Disclaimer: I wrestled with the pros and cons of submitting this here rather than in the TKLX forum since it is not specifically related to a specific software defect but it is related to software QA and is likely to get lost in the forum and there is no TKLX trouble ticket system to track service issues vs. software issues. So here is the issue.

The issue tracker tracks bad news, things that don't work, but there is no mechanism for tracking good news. It is just as important for QA to know how many working releases are deployed as it is to know how many issues there are with those deployed releases and releases under test.

I leave it in the deft hands of Alon and Liraz since it likely requires a change to the TKLX website.

Thoughts?

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Immediately after I raised this issue, Liraz published a TKLX server deployment map at http://bit.ly/tklmap2013 . You guys are PSYCHIC!

Would it be asking too much (you have done so much already) to have a permanent link to this deployment map added to the TKLS website somewhere with (in the future) a text list of the number of deployments per appliance per release (perhaps monthly updates if real-time update would be just too low on the priority list)?

This would go a long way to assisting TKLX community QA release processes in determining where a new TKLX appliance release is on it's stabilisation journey for adoption by more conservative clients or for more critical deployments. Knowing there are no issues in the issue tracker is only a partially significant quality indicator if an appliance has only one or two live deployments.

I believe this small additional statistic could be a key element in pushing the growth of TKLX appliance deployments. I know it would help my company immensely and is a common corporate quality indicator to track.

I will be happy to supply anonymous quality and deployment information about the appliances my clients use if there is an input mechanism on the website for me to input to. As an example, Wordpress plugins website has a "It Worked" mechanism (though I would hope we could find a way to ensure the TKLX community provides QA stats more consistently than the Wordpress tracking mechanism which many times has too low a contribution rate to be a significant quality indicator).

After you guys get some sleep of course after last night's stellar 13.0 formal release. Quite excellent!

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[JedMeister]

I recently saw how Bitnami implement this idea. They have an appliance rating system (1->5 star) on each appliance page. I think that's a pretty good idea!

[lirazsiri]

Lowering the bar for getting feedback from users is a great idea. We're getting something like that from the AWS marketplace. I wouldn't mind trying to embed some kind of widget (e.g., star rating) on the app pages. This probably won't work very well on its own unless we also have some mechanism in place to nudge users into giving feedback a couple of days or so after they've download/installed an appliance.