Dear Andy / EA Support Team,
Let me congratulate you for actively maintaining this forum and keeping in close contact with you users!
Also, let me mention that I am deeply familiar with the Software Support and Software Development job descriptions and I truly understand that, like in most cases, your hands are tight behind your back until development delivers a fix for this issue. I also understand that, depending on the process, issue tracking system and isolation between departments you might not even have transparency into development planning and forecasts, thus the only information you can leverage is the fact that this issue is documented.
However, because of its high severity and because of its spread impact (in terms of # and location of affected accounts), I hope you agree with me that this is a critical, if not blocker, issue.
With this premises established, having a critical/blocker regression in production for over a month and not being able to provide transparency to customers / end users about the technical origins of the miss-behavior (I know it's shameful sometimes, but it generates empathy) and about a realistic forecast of the development team (when do they estimate they will start working on it, what is their progress / learning so far, what is the estimated delivery, etc.) is a very serious thing. If I'm missing something, please correct me.
Although the use of your software system is retail, not business (i.e. a customer can't terminate tomorrow a 1 mil. dollars contract), but the impact of retail mass dissatisfaction is as tangible and maybe even harder to compensate for or revert.
I therefor encourage you to use whatever tool your process provides to escalate this issue to a higher visibility level than the current one, making decision-capable people aware of this incident. (Feel free to forward this message as well if you consider it useful).
Kind regards,
Sorin Popa, PhD
Software Architect
