First reviews coming soon?

[Ochie]

Note that the reviewer from Mashable has a pic of her Sense on twitter saying she received it this Wednesday morning. Assume it's same for other potential reviewers and we may have some reviews soon.

[NeilFinny]

I am fine without AOD, lets be honest, of all the features, telling the time is probs one of the least used!!

[NeilFinny]

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@bobby2478 wrote:

That's a common thread with the other reviews as well, they also say aod reduced battery life by 50% and only lasts 3 days. Hopefully another item Fitbit will improve upon with subsequent updates. The fact multiple reviews mentioned it leads me to believe it's not a one off but will be present for everyone. 

FWIW, my Charge 3 suffered from lag/glitchy animations/touches not responding and over time with Firmware updates these have all gone away and the device works well now. Although that's quite a time from when it was initially released. You'd figure Fitbit would learn from these mistakes and ensure subsequent devices don't suffer from the same problems out of the gate only to be rectified months down the road with fixes. They should take their time and release a product that doesn't suffer from these. There is still time until they officially launch the devices on this Friday the 25th so hopefully they are aware and have fixes ready to go in short order in the final versions consumers get.

Same complaint with the sync/Connected GPS functionality on the Charge 3. The sync behavior wouldn't work very well and Connected GPS was impossible to get a steady connection for the longest time, however now after a year it's finally working great. Hopefully all Fitbit devices don't suffer for a year of so-so performance only to really live up to their potential a year after the fact.

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I'm a web developer, and in a idea world yeah, but no software engineering/release seems to work like that.

It seems to be they have a deadline to meet and if it is usuable they push out that deadline thinking we will tweek and fix that later.

It is the same with websites, aslong as nothing is stopping you adding to basket and paying etc it is good to go!

and then you find out there is issue with checkout 😄

[bobby2478]

I work in IT so am painfully aware of the "rush" to meet an imposed deadline and the compromises that are made in order to hit that milestone, oftentimes functionality that isn't fully baked or bugs in the software that to your point is at least "usable" knowing they can fix them later. While the Sense is new, it's largely based on the Versa 3 (and even the Versa 2), not sure if the OS is a newer version then what's on the Versa 2 or not (if so perhaps that explains why there are some glitches not present on the older Versa 2).

Fitbit in general tends to take awhile to fix issues, they eventually get around to it but it might take several months for them to do it (everything at a snail's pace), so that's the real concern. Hopefully these are things Fitbit fixes relatively soon and don't carry on for months on end with no resolution in sight.

[NeilFinny]

Yeah, I hear what you are saying. It is probably managing peoples expectations that stop it, they want new features NOW.

I have worked on Magento 2 and that is the buggest piece of software going. Even 4/5 years later they are still fixing bugs.

You think why didn't they make the version 2 simple, but bug free and then add features once stable.

Maybe it is the race to stay ahead

[Jane11]

I'm only marginally connected to the IT world and I know many, including my company, are agile. In theory it seems like you promise MVP then add features after release. I have noticed though that the QA process is lacking (devs do their own QA) and perhaps with wearable technology/consumer products there is more of a push to have "all the things" semi-functional rather than adding features to an already released product.

[NeilFinny]

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@Jane11 wrote:

I have noticed though that the QA process is lacking (devs do their own QA) 

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It's not just us then 😄

[bobby2478]

I work in an "agile" environment as well and depending on the program I will say it depends. In theory, being "agile" means you should deliver the functionality the customer actually wants in faster increments then "waterfall", but in my experience that isn't how it plays out. Regardless of whether "agile" or "waterfall", organizations like Fitbit struggle between prioritizing a backlog of new features/functionality to lure in new customers vs the backlog of known "defects" or issues, many times when they may not know how many users are impacted by a particular issue resulting in it being lower priority.

Fitbit's QA process definitely leaves a lot to be desired. I'm also not sure how confident I am that when problems are experienced by customers what exactly is the feedback mechanism that ensures these get over to the dev teams (if they aren't aware of a defect they won't fix it).  Like I said, eventually Fitbit seems to get their devices working. My Charge 3 finally is working well but that's well over a year after the device was launched initially. It may work fine for awhile, then a firmware update introducing new features/fixing other bugs can break other things (which regression testing should be able to catch). This isn't unique to Fitbit, a lot of people struggle with this. Still frustrating.

[Jane11]

Do most places even do regression testing? I had forgotten about that. Initially we had done three QA servers then staging then release. Now it's straight to release. It's a different business, granted.

[bobby2478]

If you care about quality regression testing is a must especially in a customer facing environment. The challenge is whether this can be 100% automated and how do you accommodate the thousands of combinations of different devices (all the various Android devices and manufacturers), Android versions, Web browsers (edge vs chrome vs safari, PC vs mobile, various version #'s) which needs to be automated using some form of virtual device (you can't physically have a person test each of these thousands of combinations each time you release something).  Then you have Apple as well, at least Apple keeps most devices on the most up to date OS version and they control the hardware/software so should be more consistent and less fragmented then Android.