If Asked For A Backup

[gary]

On some occasions, when a problem is reports the developers or support staff may decide that the issue you have reports warrants closer investigation, so they can update documentation to prevent others having the problem, or make a software enhancement to improve operation and reliability.

In most instances, this will happen if the issue you have described cannot easily be duplicated. And the reason they will ask for a backup is so they can examine what is happening in the program code using the exact same circumstances you are experiencing.

DO NOT SEND A BACKUP UNLESS YOU ARE ASKED TO DO SO. Unsolicited backups will be deleted without examination. If a backup is requested, you will be provided with an email address where the backup should be sent.

When sending a backup, please follow these steps precisely.

a) Provide the backup as SELLmatix Backups created off the File Menu, and provide backups of both POS and Control. If for some reason that is not possible, provide the backups in standard ZIP format. Yes there are other archive utilities, but NO, we are not going to look for, and download yet another archive utility just so that we can look at your data. If you send a backup in some format other than ZIP it will be deleted without examination.

b) Provide SEPARATE backup files for POS and Control, which are named in the format "YOURNAME POS.zip" and "YOURNAME CONTROL.zip"

c) Either tell us the logins and passwords you use in the email containing the backups, or else remove the logins and passwords before creating the backup you send us.

Yes, we wrote the software, and yes we can modify code to allow us to access the data. But it wastes our time, and we have other things to do. If you can't be bothered to provide us the passwords, we can't be bothered to waste our time either.

d) Describe EXACTLY how to duplicate the problem you are describing. Most problems occur because you have done something strange with the data entered. And where data has been entered "normally" behavior will be different.

For example, don't say "On some products it does x, but on other products it does y". Instead say "on product code 1111111 it does x, but on product code 2222222 it does y". We are not going to go through a 5000 record product file to find an example of where it does x, and an example of where it does y. You need to tell us.

Another example from just yesterday. We asked for and were sent a backup and images showing a situation where the totals and discount rounding was shown differently on the account and later on the receipt. The products used were shown on the documents so we should have been able to perform the same sequence of operations on a development machine inside the debugger.

Except that the product shown on the examples sent did not appear on any of the 17 input screens in POS. To help this client, we had to waste our time checking each of the 17 input screens looking for the product they had used, and then creating a button to try and emulate what they had described.

Make it easy for us to help you. Describe how to duplicate the issue you have with the minimum number of keystrokes. It may be that the sequence of operation you are using, is incorrect and contributing to the problem. If we have to guess what sequence of operation you have used, and we do something different to what you have done, then we may get a different result from what you describe, and thus will be unable to identify the problem.

Yet another example. An issue was reported relating to ingredients today. The description was fairly clear, however only about 25% of the 2,700 product records used ingredients. So to try and duplicate the problem, we had to look through lots of records before finding a record which did use ingredient tracking. In future, we won't do that.

The correct procedure in this case would have been to say "Product Code 11111, when using ingredient codes 22222 and 33333 does y.

e) In each of the instances mentioned here, the problem was that the documentation had not been followed, and there was a configuration error. After wasting all that time to find the problem, our response was simply to provide the URL where the correct procedure was covered in the online documentation.

Before reporting a problem, triple check the documentation and the configuration.

If we ask for a backup, the reason we are doing so is to try and help you. Please make it easy for us, not difficult.