In addition to working on building new functionality, we also spend quite a bit of time focusing on fixing small issues or tweaking existing functionality to make things work just a little bit better. Every software project has a list of these types of issues that are small enough to fly under the radar for a time, but after a while they become irksome enough to demand attention. Another interesting aspect of resolving these issues is that the time to research and locate the problem often far exceeds the time to fix the problem. More than half of the battle is often just being able to duplicate the problem. Also, many of these types of issues are somewhat fleeting in nature – they are seen occasionally, but efforts to reproduce them on the sport are often fruitless and frustrating.
Each of our development cycles typically includes time to address these types of issues. The current sprint does not depart from this practice.
Here is a list of some of these types of issues that we are currently running down:
- There is a situation with the course builder where the editor will stop being responsive and freeze up. We have occasionally heard about this issue for a while now. Based on a new reporting of this problem, I spent some time yesterday trying to duplicate it. I was actually successful and identified at least one combination of steps in Internet Explorer 7 that will cause the problem. If this happens to you before we get a fix out, try to click on another section of the course or refresh your page (F5 in many browsers). This action may reposition you to a new chapter in the course. In terms of fixing the problem, we see that the supplier of the editor we use (Telerik) has had this problem reported to them. We are going to research the issue further with them. I hope to have a fix for this by the time of our next release. If you have any experience with this problem also, please either contact support (support@learningzen.com) or comment on this blog entry. I would love to know what steps you are using to cause this problem to happen. Oh, by the way, IE 7 may report an error in this situation, which includes the code 800a025e.
- Another issue that I know causes some of our users a bit of frustration is the loss of formatting when pasting from Microsoft Word or a web page. We are pretty dependent on our editor vendor in this situation as well, but if you have either success stories or have encountered issues in this area, I would like to hear from you.
- We discovered the other day that the time on the certificates doesn’t reflect the local time zone of the students. We are working on correcting this.
- We make little user interface tweaks all the time. For instance, right now we are working on widening the control that contains the list of users in a portal. Also, the current user list in a portal needs a little formatting TLC.
- We think the file uploading process used for course thumbnails, avatars, portal logos, etc. could use a little improvement. For instance, there is not standardization in terms of how many times users need to click to save, and the controls don’t look the same in all browsers. We are working on replacing these controls with improved ones.
- We also continually try to monitor our outgoing emails and see how spam blockers rate them. We seek to better our scores from these tools.
- We are also redoing the course history section of the bookshelf. This is a very old part of the site (in internet terms) and really needs to be updated to be aware of all situations that can happen while taking courses.
- Finally, we try to make our site usable in all the major browsers and versions, but sometimes we find that certain aspects of the site don’t function as well as they could on a particular browser. For instance, we are fixing a problem with the portal switcher on Internet Explorer 6 right now.
I hope that gives you some insight into our efforts to keep improving LearningZen. As usual, please comment on the blog and send us your thoughts.
Thomas Klassen
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