My suggestion: No more new features for a while

[Guest]

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[Amy-in-PHX]

Here is my suggestion for Kiva:  Introduce no new "features" on the site, until after the bugs that resulted from past rollouts have been identified and squashed.

I posted before about the fact that lenders from the US and Canada no longer have their country names as part of their icons.  Kiva may also want to consider fixing the fact that lender icons don't show up in straight rows any more.  Click on these links to see examples of what I mean -- on the first one, look at the lenders' icons on a Loan Page, and on the second one, look at the lenders' icons on a team's "Members" page:  http://www.kiva.org/lend/307584 and http://www.kiva.org/team/supporting_younger_borrowers/members

If the point of "squaring" all the photos on the site was to create a neat & clean appearance, I have to say that the effort has not succeeded so far.  It would look a lot better if all the photos at least sat on a single line.

From what I have observed, over the past 6+ months, it seems like every rollout of new features introduces a host of new problems.  Maybe complicated new features ought to be put off, until the existing code can be cleaned up and made to work as intended.

[JohnAtKiva]

Hello Amy!

I did want to clarify one thing.  Kiva's code base is over six years old!  (The first loans were funded on Kiva in April 2005.) A lot of the site is older code at this point, and like all websites there's probably a fair amount of duplicate code in different places that's all meant to do the same thing.  This makes a website much harder to maintain, especially if and when the original programmers start to move on to other projects.

One of the things that isn't immediately apparent outside of the org is that Kiva is working do fix this, by making a significant effort to restructure its code to make it easier to maintain!  I've posted a bit about it on KivaFriends, but it's been a while since I posted a reminder.  You can read up a bit on the benefits of restructuring your code here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_refactoring

And here's an interesting article on what happens when you don't invest in these sorts of technical efforts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt

Making changes to the code to make it easier to maintain is generally a good thing, but it can have some real costs (in addition to taking up a lot of time and resources).  One of these costs is that bugs sometimes get inadvertently introduced into the code.  If some engineers are working on this sort of code maintenance and others are working on new features, it can definitely seem as if, "every rollout of new features introduces a host of new problems."  But in actuality, the code maintenance work on the backend is very much separate from the efforts that result in new features.

I hope that helps explain things a bit! In the meantime, the engineers definitely want to get bug reports.  I just checked your link in Chrome and it looked ok, but then I looked in IE8 and saw the issues you described.  I'll post those to the bugs database right away, and hopefully we can get that fixed asap.

Best,
John

[Amy-in-PHX]

I just checked your link in Chrome and it looked ok, but then I looked in IE8 and saw the issues you described.  I'll post those to the bugs database right away, and hopefully we can get that fixed asap.

Oops, sorry, John - I meant to specify that I was using IE8, but forgot to put that in before I posted.  Thanks for posting to the bugs database.  I'll send such observations to contactus in future, for "bug reporting" purposes.

[JohnAtKiva]

Oops, sorry, John - I meant to specify that I was using IE8, but forgot to put that in before I posted.  Thanks for posting to the bugs database.  I'll send such observations to contactus in future, for "bug reporting" purposes.

Thanks for the confirmation on browser version.

I just posted a detailed bug report complete with screenshot!  Hopefully the bug gets fixed soon.

Thanks again,
John

[Amy-in-PHX]

Making changes to the code to make it easier to maintain is generally a good thing, but it can have some real costs (in addition to taking up a lot of time and resources).  One of these costs is that bugs sometimes get inadvertently introduced into the code.  If some engineers are working on this sort of code maintenance and others are working on new features, it can definitely seem as if, "every rollout of new features introduces a host of new problems."  But in actuality, the code maintenance work on the backend is very much separate from the efforts that result in new features.

I did a bit of reading about "code," starting from your links.  I found this:  "If you have a poorly factored program that does what the customer wants and has no serious bugs, for the love of Mike leave it alone! When you need to fix a bug or add a feature, you RefactorMercilessly the code that you encounter in your efforts. Thus, RefactorMercilessly can live in harmony with IfItIsWorkingDontChange."  It was on this page:  http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhatIsRefactoring

If I understood correctly what you wrote, John, you have said that many bugs don't result from introduction of new features, but result instead from code that was "poorly factored" to begin with, or from unintended consequences of refactoring the code.  Since I've never programmed anything myself, that's about as far as I can get in understanding this.  I'm just expressing some user frustration, which I don't think is unique to me.  It would be good if we could all spend less time documenting bugs -- and the potential costs of making changes to the software need to be weighed when considering new features.  I question whether a new feature devoted to setting aside particular loans for funding by members of one lending team, for example, is going to further the mission (connecting people, through lending, to alleviate poverty) enough to be worth the costs, including bugs that are virtually certain to come with it.

[JohnAtKiva]

I'm just expressing some user frustration, which I don't think is unique to me.

I think that is totally fair, Amy!

I question whether a new feature devoted to setting aside particular loans for funding by members of one lending team, for example, is going to further the mission (connecting people, through lending, to alleviate poverty) enough to be worth the costs, including bugs that are virtually certain to come with it.

This felt a bit less fair to me. :-(  I did comment on a thread about a potential feature along these lines, including posting a reference to Kiva's mission.  But I tried to be very clear that I was participating in the thread as an individual and not representing any sort of organizational viewpoint?  I was also posting in my free time over a holiday weekend.

Here's a random idea (this comes from me as an individual, and is not meant to represent any sort of organizational view). :-)

(I should clarify that I'm speaking here as an individual, and that my post here reflects my personal interest and not necessarily any sort of organizational interest in this idea!)

I just want to stress one last time that this is just me as an individual responding to Rebecca's neat idea and John R's follow-on idea, and thinking out loud about ways to build on the ideas.  In no way does this reflect any sort of organizational effort of any kind to investigate team loans.  It's just me thinking out loud on the weekend.

Perhaps you were not referring to my comments on that thread though?  Let me know...

Thanks,
John

[Amy-in-PHX]

This felt a bit less fair to me. :-(  I did comment on a thread about a potential feature along these lines, including posting a reference to Kiva's mission.  But I tried to be very clear that I was participating in the thread as an individual and not representing any sort of organizational viewpoint?  I was also posting in my free time over a holiday weekend.

Perhaps you were not referring to my comments on that thread though?  Let me know...

Thanks,
John

What I wrote did not have anything to do with attributing your "individual" comments to Kiva as an organization.  I was not referring to you in particular, at all, but I did refer to the idea of a new feature that several people (including you) have discussed in another thread.  I'm afraid I don't understand what was unfair.  (But I am mildly opposed to the feature idea, itself -- in part because I don't see it furthering the mission and in part because I fear the bugs that may result.  I also think there are other things Kiva could spend time on that would have more benefit to its mission, like the one I wrote up today, about making the Sector and Activity fields useful.  When I mentioned the "mission," I was writing in my own personal capacity as a user of Kiva, not referring back to your post in another thread.)

[AccountAbility]

Going back to the original post, the results of the "new design" with squared off pictures are still a mess.  Sometimes as many as half the teams on a loan are now unintelligible because of cropping and all sorts of borrower and lender photos are rendered grotesque.  It's this kind of stuff that sometimes just leaves us shaking our heads and definitely diminishes the lender experience.  The dropping of the country names is an annoyance which probably could have been avoided.

Giving credit where credit is due, the recent thread here that was initiated by Kiva staff (sorry, John, no slight intended--I just don't remember her name    ) is an excellent example of putting forth a change in the works and getting feedback before it goes live--thus significantly reducing the problems when it does go live.

Dan

[Amy-in-PHX]

Going back to the original post, the results of the "new design" with squared off pictures are still a mess.  Sometimes as many as half the teams on a loan are now unintelligible because of cropping and all sorts of borrower and lender photos are rendered grotesque. 

With respect to team photos, there is something Kiva could do that might not take too much time, but would help to clean up the "unintelligible" icon problem.  Specifically, a member of the Canada team has posted that the team's captain is no longer active on Kiva.  This member says that Kiva, itself, has no ability to designate a new captain for the team.  So, since the old captain is unresponsive, no one is able to upload a new image for the team icon.  Maybe it would be a good idea for Kiva to give itself the ability to step in and designate a new captain for a team, when requested to do so by team members.  (If the original team captain has ceased to log in to Kiva for several months, that is.)

[Cailin@Kiva]

With respect to team photos, there is something Kiva could do that might not take too much time, but would help to clean up the "unintelligible" icon problem.  Specifically, a member of the Canada team has posted that the team's captain is no longer active on Kiva.  This member says that Kiva, itself, has no ability to designate a new captain for the team.  So, since the old captain is unresponsive, no one is able to upload a new image for the team icon.  Maybe it would be a good idea for Kiva to give itself the ability to step in and designate a new captain for a team, when requested to do so by team members.  (If the original team captain has ceased to log in to Kiva for several months, that is.)

Hi Amy,

Thank-you for the suggestion for a very practical solution to this problem!  We are going to follow your suggestion, and introduce a new feature and a new policy that allows Kiva customer service to appoint an additional team captain in the event that a team captain can no longer be contacted by team members and Kiva customer service.  This feature should be included in an upcoming release, on or around, August 9th.

So, help for the Team Canada flag is on the way!  (I am, by the way, a Canadian myself.)

Cailin.

[Jan & John]

Hi Amy,

Thank-you for the suggestion for a very practical solution to this problem!  We are going to follow your suggestion, and introduce a new feature and a new policy that allows Kiva customer service to appoint an additional team captain in the event that a team captain can no longer be contacted by team members and Kiva customer service.  This feature should be included in an upcoming release, on or around, August 9th.

So, help for the Team Canada flag is on the way!  (I am, by the way, a Canadian myself.)

Cailin.

  three cheers for Cailin