Getting help, and what to expect

Shipbuilder is a living application. It changes because people using it say what should be different, and this page is about how that conversation works — and how to make sure your part of it lands.

The issue log

Every wish, question and problem goes into the issue log. It is owned and kept by the key users — the people in your organisation who use Shipbuilder most and know how your project is set up. Raise things with them first: they will often know the answer, they will know whether somebody else has asked the same, and they turn the rest into entries the developers pick up and iterate on.

The log is also where you see what has been decided about your wish, so ask your key user for a look at it rather than wondering.

Reaching Shipbuilder

Your key user is the first stop. Beyond that, Shipbuilder is reachable by phone and e-mail through your contact person — ask your key user who that is for your organisation. Support is by e-mail, phone or an online meeting, and a meeting goes much faster when you can get back to the screen it happened on.

Production issues are addressed urgently. Something that stops work on the production environment is not an issue-log entry that waits for the next release — say that it is production, say what stopped, and it is picked up straight away. The responders are fast; help them by being specific (below).

Your data is safe

Daily backups are taken of all the data. Nothing you enter is one accident away from being gone, and a workspace can be brought back to the state it had on a given day.

How updates arrive

There are two environments, and they move at different speeds:

• The test server is updated continuously — new things appear there for review and feedback as soon as they are built. If you have asked for something, that is where you will see it first, and where your feedback on it is wanted.
• The production server is updated every Monday night, outside office hours. On Tuesday morning the changes of that week are live.

After a release, What’s new in the account menu (your initials, top right) lists everything that changed, newest first. A dot on your initials means there are notes you have not read yet.

Account menu → What's new. Read it on a Tuesday morning.

Account menu → What's new. Read it on a Tuesday morning.

Say where you were

Shipbuilder has a lot of pages that look alike. “The name field doesn’t save” cannot be found by anybody, because there are several hundred name fields. What makes a problem findable is the path to the screen you were on, in this order:

1. Which environment? Test or production — the address in the browser’s bar. This is the one people leave out, and it decides whether anybody else can even reproduce it.
2. Which workspace? From the selector in the top right.
3. Which menu, and which item? Documents; Communication → Transmittals…
4. Overview page or detail page? The left half or the right half.
5. Which tab, and which block? A detail page has several grids and they have titles — Has comments is a different grid from Has correspondence.
6. A screenshot of the whole window, including the menu bar and the notification if one is up. A cropped screenshot of the field loses every answer above.

The version from the account menu’s About is worth adding, and so is what you expected to happen — it is not always as obvious to a reader as it is to you.

The notification is evidence

If a red mutation failed appeared, say so and quote it. A write that failed and a write that succeeded but was not what you wanted are different problems with different fixes, and the notification is the only thing that distinguishes them after the fact.