Bug Tracking? Software development processes?

[Darkstar]

I hope this posting gets answered by the Software Developers/Engineers at Amcrest as this is not an issue that is addressable by fellow users, and the answers to these questions will give me and other users some idea of the quality and maturity of Amcrest's software development processes. I am a very advance software engineer myself (retired now) and have reported a few bugs both here in the forums and directly to Amcrest Support. I have managed to get the Amcrest front end support team to push some of the bugs I reported to them, on to what they refer to as the Amcrest R&D team but gotten no feedback from the R&D members directly.

I have bought quite a few Amcrest cameras myself so I do have a considerable investment in them. And I have a growing concern about the quality of Amcrest's software development process. For example, does the Amcrest software development team uses any sort of formal bug tracking methodology? I have read many postings on these forums that reported a bug, or judgement about poor user interfaces, poor design/documentation etc. But I see little evidence that these reports are getting turned into formal bug reports that can actually be tracked to a conclusion. What actually prompted me to ask about bug tracking was the posting titled "Open letter about the state of Amcrest software" which raised this and a number of other serious concerns I have.

This posting is a bit of a test to see how active and how much monitoring the actual software engineers and team leaders at Amcrest do on this forum. So I would like to ask Amcrest's software engineers/team leaders these questions -

1. What sort of bug tracking process/software does Amcrest use and is any part of it accessible for public use/observation?

2. What sort of software development methodology is used at Amcrest? Continuous Integration? Prototyping? Incremental development? Rapid app development? Why did you choose the methodology?

3. What sort of software development process is used at Amcrest? Agile? Scrum? Waterfall? Spiral? Extreme Programming? Other? Why did you choose this process?

4. Does the software development team have a roadmap of firmware updates and/or patches that they plan to release? Is it available for the users to see? While dates for releases are hard to pin down, it would be good to know what bugs are planed to be fixed, in what release, and for what cameras.

5. What process or methodology does Amcrest use to keep software features, GUI's, and external documentation in sync?

6. How does Amcrest gather ideas and feedback for new features and what formal processes does Amcrest use to insure new ideas and feedback doesn't get lost and get put into the roadmaps/plans for future releases? Do users get incorporated into round-table discussions or other forms of brainstorming activities for new ideas and features?

7. What process does Amcrest use for releases? Is there formal white box analysis and reviews? Black box testing? Regression tests? If so how are test cases chosen, designed and added to a regression test suite?

[Revo2Maxx]

Seeing this was more of General Security Chat and not much related to the IP Camera area where it was posted it was moved to the right area..

[riiken]

I'd like to know as well.

I'm getting a number of console errors I'd like to report on the web viewer, which could be the reason why I'm not able view a video feed on any browser (with the plugin installed).

I'm curious about the tech stack you guys are using. I see JQuery and JQuery UI being used which makes it seem like this codebase was built 10 years ago. And you could probably skip the whole Chrome plugin step if you utilize the native HTML5 video player or some sort of video JavaScript framework.

I feel like the software could use a overhaul.

Also, is your software development team from China? While inspecting the DOM, I'm able to see inline comments written in Chinese characters.

[Kwing]

Hi Darkstar, unfortunately due to internal reasons we cannot openly discuss our R&D processes. However the team does read feedback and do our best to meet those demands and considerations as much as possible. If you have any further requests or inquiries please feel free to contact our support at amcrest.com/amcrestsupport. Thank you.