A Week with Support

Some time ago, Stephen blogged about The Guild Launch Development Approach. Today I am going to lead you through a typical week for me at Guild Launch.

My primary role at Guild Launch is Technical Support. I handle all of our support emails and phone calls. Like the rest of the team here, I get to wear many hats so it keeps me on my toes and makes sure I am never bored. Lets take a day by day look.

Monday

Mondays are super busy for me. I have tickets from Friday night through Monday and work extra hard to answer all of the weekends tickets plus the tickets from Monday before I leave. With more than 1 million users, that is a lot of tickets!

Monday is a sacred ticket only day, but like all rules there is an exception to this one - Testing. We do releases on Wednesday and when I test on Monday, it is the second to last day of the testing cycle. To help reduce some of that pressure, sometimes I will come in for a few hours on Sunday.

Tuesday

The first few hours of my Tuesday morning are spent auditing Ventrilo. We have a process that suspends canceled servers on Tuesday and I monitor that process. These servers stay suspended for a few days and are then deleted at the end of the week if they have not been reactivated.

After Ventrilo I work on tickets for most of the day. Because of server maintenance for several games on Tuesday, I tend to have quite a few tickets.

If I am testing, I will spend the majority of my time after lunch finding bugs and working with the new functionality. If by the end of the day I do not feel good about the release or I was unable to test a new feature fully, I will tell Stephen and we will push the release back a week.

Wednesday

Wednesday is our release day and the first thing I do after the release goes out is double check account registration and guild creation, then touch on some of the new features. For the first few hours I monitor tickets very closely while Stephen watches the Support Forums. I wish every release could be perfect and bug free, but I do miss the "edge case" bugs. In our last release, there was a bug with the Shout Box, but that bug only happened when it was placed above the Forums and in testing, I placed it on the left.

If we do not have a release, I knock out the tickets from overnight and work on other things.
Since tickets are a touch lighter I have more time to do other things such as adding new games to our database, learn about add-on development and visit some of your sites. I also read a lot about testing methodology to help solidify our testing process.

Wednesday is also the day I have blocked off for Pro Tips.

Thursday

Thursday is usually the day I start testing, and I start it a week or two before a release. While testing, I will answer tickets and tend to do them in blocks. Test for a couple of hours, answer tickets for a couple of hours.

Much like Wednesday, if there is no testing to do I have plenty of other activities to keep me busy and I generally do the same things; research, add games, learn better methods for testing, etc.

Friday

I treat Friday similar to Monday. It is the last day of the week and I will be out of the office for two days, so I tend to focus on tickets and making sure my box is empty before I leave. Friday is also the day that all of the suspended Ventrilo servers are deleted and I oversee that process.

If I am testing on Friday, I will try to test the larger more complex changes to avoid running out of time on Monday and Tuesday.

At the end of the day, I take a few minutes to organize my desk and make sure I have a plan for the next week. I keep a list of the games I want to add as well as requested games, organize my notes for future feature ideas and side projects and make sure I am ready when I walk in on Monday.

Weekends

The only time I come in the office on a weekend is if I am testing and I feel that I can not finish before Wednesday. I do browse sites from home over the weekend to keep an extra set of eyes on things and will often log into our ticket system to look for any reported downtime tickets.

That is a general look at my week and as you can tell, the majority of my day is spent providing the quality support you have come to expect from Guild Launch. I will be back here on Wednesday with another Pro Tip and in the mean time, keep those emails coming!

~Mike