No Quality Assurance for New Releases? shortDescription vs short_description, ProcessEmailQueue.failed

[incubatec]

After upgrading to release 8.5.1 we are unable to change product detail if translations are enabled, I have already opened a ticket for this and the bug is confirmed as #CORE-17808.

But I had to explain this bug twice and at first I was told that I had an error in the SQL schema (the problem being that shortDescription is referenced as the SQL column name, whereas the actual schema is "short_description"), without even reading my ticket/error report correctly.

In addition this is something really simple, a basic operation (change a product!) that any decent quality assurance or even unit test should have catched. So I am asking what quality assurance has WHMCS? It seems that the number of bugs ist getting bigger with new releases and I would rather have those bugs fixed that getting ever new features that are only.. minimally useful or at best incremental.

Also most of the times those updates are done in a production env and I fully expected a .1-release to have most bugs fixed. But now I have not even been given an ETA.

WHMCS is requesting premium/enterprise pricing on a monthly and per user base, but I am not happy with the quality as bugs seem to be running rampant and no real tests seem to be performed before relasing a new version into production.

When will a hotfix be available?

Also there are many other issues, also reported here in the community, that are still not being taken care of, e. g. why is the "tbllog_register" table filled with "ProcessEmailQueue.failed" messages?

Edited August 26, 2022 by incubatec

[pRieStaKos]

On 8/26/2022 at 12:15 PM, incubatec said:

So I am asking what quality assurance has WHMCS?

None since WHMCS joined cPanel.

All fixes are been processed during the small beta phase and then after stable release we are the bug reporters. It’s cheaper (and faster) than releasing a stable version that comes from QA testing… 😆

Edited August 28, 2022 by pRieStaKos

[incubatec]

I don't mind WebPros (cPanel, WHMCS, Plesk etc.) optimizing for cashflow, but not at the expense of quality assurance.

Just for reference I received an update for the ProcessEMailQueue.failed message in the tbllog_register by WHMCS, which I am partially quoting here:

###

...
These entries are made whenever the EmailCampaigns and
ProcessEmailQueue Cron Tasks are run (as soon as every 5 minutes). Both tasks
are designed to always run, as the system needs to check whether or not an
Email Campaign is active, and there may be situations where queued emails
need to be sent even after a campaign has been disabled.
...

###

So this is expected behaviour and "normal" (according to WHMCS). I have made further points in my reply, but just in case somebody stumbles across this issue, this can be found in this pulic community.

Edited August 29, 2022 by incubatec

[WHMCS John]

Hi @incubatec,

Any defects are always regrettable, but an inevitable part of software production. That said, we were able to confirm this issue and log it as case CORE-17808, which will be resolved in the very next release (v8.6.0).

We've also published a help guide with details of a workaround: https://help.whmcs.com/m/v85/l/1601133-troubleshooting-a-column-not-found-1054-unknown-column-shortdescription-in-field-list-error