Apologies, but this software is in a terrible state

While the direction and roadmap to Scoutbook Plus is aggressive, it is, unfortunately, poorly executed. Granted, I am a software architect, and have been for 25 years, I may be a bit hard on this deployment. I am a 7-year user of the previous Scoutbook software, and while it had its issues, they were not as egregious as those in Scoutbook Plus.

What I have noticed is that this release has not had a proper QA cycle, not only are there holistic issues, but rather straightforward unit failures.

I see backend errors boiling up to the front-end that indicate proper integration testing has not taken place.

It is quite evident that this was prematurely released, and seems to indicate the technical teams and managerial teams were not effectively communicating.

At this point there should be a concerted effort to implement a mitigation plan.

Right now, no leader in our troop is able to make any advancement changes within Scoutbook Plus and our own disaster control effort is to move to paper….well Google Sheets anyway. :slight_smile:

I do not envy those frantically trying to beat this software into production shape.

When evaluating the next steps, it’s important to consider the amount of time and effort required to rollback to the previous version vs. live break-fixes.

Good luck and remember to do a thorough software post-mortem.

@MichaelWilkinson

You say no one in your unit can update Scoutbook Plus. Have your Key 3, Key 3 delegates or Unit Advancement. Chair in my.scouting.org tried? We know there are issues with those that are not admins in legacy Scoutbook but we have not heard of any unit where no one can make updates.

If your Key 3 cannot make updates please provide Scouting America Member IDs (no names), what they tried and the error received.