State of Sencha address

[gwyn_carwardine]

I was pleased to receive an email inviting me to this event on Thursday - sadly I'm going to be between London and Doha at the time.

It promises:

• Sencha Roadmap overview, including new and upcoming product releases
• Growth initiatives to reignite the momentum of Ext JS
• Preview of Ext JS 7.0

I'm particularly interested in the second point. Extjs is a brilliant product let down by the organisation behind it. I'm hopeful this means that there is going to be renewed investment into Extjs and I would hope that priorities would be:

1. Fixing bugs. I've raised many bugs over the last year or so and not a single one has been fixed
2. Make the Modern toolkit do everything that the Classic toolkit does, as a *minimum*
3. Making the bug database accessible so that existing bugs can be seen and save spending hours diagnosing problems and recreating them only to be told "we already know about that one"
4. Actually test products before releasing them

It's a big ask - I'm sure this space is competitive but Extjs is (in theory anyway) the best product I've found for building Web Apps.

And Extjs 7 had better promise parity between Modern and Classic otherwise I'm going to be pissed off again.

[tangix]

2. Make the Modern toolkit do everything that the Classic toolkit does, as a *minimum*

So true! Just working on a project in modern 6.7 and I couldn't believe it when I saw that RadioGroup is missing from modern!?!? What the ****?!?

Sadly I think the "growth initiatives" are too little, too late. The train has left the station for Ext JS to be a go-to-solution for new developers - there are cooler frameworks around. I was seriously considering alternatives to Ext JS for my current project, but since the project was tight on time I stuck to Ext JS.
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised to see a change of bundling the different PRO and ENTERPRISE packages (for example, say that some cool 7.0 enhancements to the grid is only available to enterprise customers, just like the Pivot Grid) and a price-hike.

[tangix]

OK just finished watching, WebComponents seems interesting.
The talk about Quality and Innovation - only time will tell. I'm happy at 6.7 and migrated to open tooling for a couple of projects.
Keeping fingers crossed for 2019.

[JRossi]

I was happy with what i heard, but they totally ignored my question about when we can expect access to the bug tracker. I can't be the only person who asked that?

[sebastian.dimap]

When will the recording be available?

[dougbieber]

Inappropriate language on the Internet? Who knew?

I had the ears of top Sencha developers and Execs during dinner 1.5 years ago. This was the biggest topic that I raised. Mitchell was sitting next to me and I respectfully countered their argument. Adobe has a public Jira. If they don't have an issue with it then neither should Sencha.

-Doug

[mitchellsimoens]

Yep, I've never heard any reasons execs didn't want it open other than customer data and the foul language. I can at least understand that and even though the internet is full of foul language, that doesn't mean a company wants to have that on an official site. Customer data (even just names) should also be treated special, not all customers want people to know they use a certain vendor even if just for vulnerabilities.

[gwyn_carwardine]

Yep, I've never heard any reasons execs didn't want it open other than customer data and the foul language. I can at least understand that and even though the internet is full of foul language, that doesn't mean a company wants to have that on an official site. Customer data (even just names) should also be treated special, not all customers want people to know they use a certain vendor even if just for vulnerabilities.

To me this is a misunderstanding of how to manage customer reports and bugs. A customer report (or "Incident") is the customer saying that something doesn't appear to be working as it should. This has a lifecycle where it is investigated and if indeed there is a bug then a separate bug (or "Problem") is created. An Incident never becomes a Problem. Multiple Incidents may be related to the same Problem. The Problem is then managed through its lifecycle, potentially resulting in one or more Changes that are then delivered in one of more Releases. Customer data is only every held in the Incident. The Problem is customer agnostic and there is no reason why it should not be public. Bugs that are discovered during dev and test that are not resolved should also be recorded as Problems and are "Known Errors".

So there is no need to publish customer information - the company just needs to implement proper Service Management principles and not rely on mickey-mouse bug tracking. It's simply not good acceptable for a company the size of Sencha.

[mitchellsimoens]

To me this is a misunderstanding of how to manage customer reports and bugs. A customer report (or "Incident") is the customer saying that something doesn't appear to be working as it should. This has a lifecycle where it is investigated and if indeed there is a bug then a separate bug (or "Problem") is created. An Incident never becomes a Problem. Multiple Incidents may be related to the same Problem. The Problem is then managed through its lifecycle, potentially resulting in one or more Changes that are then delivered in one of more Releases. Customer data is only every held in the Incident. The Problem is customer agnostic and there is no reason why it should not be public. Bugs that are discovered during dev and test that are not resolved should also be recorded as Problems and are "Known Errors".

So there is no need to publish customer information - the company just needs to implement proper Service Management principles and not rely on mickey-mouse bug tracking. It's simply not good acceptable for a company the size of Sencha.

100% agree but a lot of the workflow was pre-any tool to organize and make it searchable. For example, we started adding labels to jiras with company names so that managers had a place to find all jira issues belonging to a company. Also, a company would contact Sencha via support portal, here on the forums, via a sales person and so jira was treated as the source of truth for all this organization. When I built the new portal and fiddle and other apps, I could have easily built something to more manage the linkage between all the things but they wanted something right away so they went with jira and that wasn't at all surprising.

[mcg1103]

I watched part of this and will complete watching later.

I was surprised that Atanas Popov seem to have a clue as to what was going on within Sencha. My assumption was that he could not care less about Sencha and it was just another product he was selling. This was because of how poorly it seems the company has been ran over the last year... it just seemed there was no one running it and it was just circling the drain. I mentioned to my Sencha sales rep that they needed some leadership... he then told me they were bringing on a new GM. Enter Kegan Blumenthal.

I am curious to hear what Kegan has done since joining the company. I would be curious to know what Kegan's mandate is regarding Sencha. I would like to think it is to make Sencha relevant again, but I doubt that. My guess is that it is to make Sencha short term profitable.

They are talking about investment in Sencha but they can't even get someone to answer simple questions on the forum... even for paying customers.

I need to finish the webinar before commenting further.

-Mark