Why is Pro so terrible after all these years?

[_____]

I've been using ArcMap for as long as I can because it actually works, but I know it's being retired next year. I figured Pro would have a lot of improvements since I last tried to use it, but it's exactly as I remember... a buggy, unusable mess. All I'm doing is dragging a field over to the end of the attribute table and it crashes every single time (video attached).

Unbelievable... actually not at all, at this point I just expect it.

[JohnGuilfoyle]

Same here.
I do Network Analyst Routing, and rather than making the process better than ArcMap, ArcPro has eliminated some of the most fundamental aspects of what I do.  The Network Analyst window would allow me to drag and drop or cut and paste to resequence Stops in a Route, but now it must be done manually.
There are no useful training materials or videos.

[SimonSchütte_ct]

Some workflows may be user specific. Did you create an idea for this functionality? Something like drag and drop functionality is usually implemented quite fast once the dev team is aware that it is something that is missing. You can link the idea here and we´ll give it an upvote.

[_____]

*GASP* No way, that can't be!

[Luke_Pinner]

My experience is the opposite.

I used to dread having to open the horribly unstable and agonisingly slow mess that was ArcMap whenever I needed certain functionality that hadn't (at the time) been added to ArcGIS Pro which I find fast and stable.  

I don't have any workflows that ArcMap could do better (or at all) now though, unlike John with Network Analyst, so I now no longer have ArcMap installed and do not miss it in the slightest.

I don't know why ArcMap was so slow and unstable for me, probably because of our IT environment/database/system/network at the time and the add-ins that were installed (mix of python and .net add-ins). I suspect the python add-ins were a big contributing factor with the crashiness. 

So my point is don't just blame Pro (or ArcMap in my case), look at the environment it's running in as well.

[_____]

I'm definitely blaming Pro.

[BarryNorthey]

The MVP tag is offered to people who voluntarily participate in esri forums and have achieved and maintain a flow of solutions and kudos. The esri tag is assigned to esri employees.

[SimonSchütte_ct]

I worked with ArcMap and ArcGIS Pro when the first ArcGIS Pro release came out.
At the beginning ArcGIS Pro was missing most of the features and GP-Tools I needed at the time were not yet migrated to Pro, so I used both. I did not open ArcMap in the last 4 years and I don´t miss it. There were constant crashes and I cannot count the number of hours of lost work because of a sudden crash of ArcMap.
Now I barely remember the last time ArcGIS Pro crashed on me.

ArcGIS Pro has been providing the functional scope of ArcMap for some time now. There may be some workflows that need to be adjusted to what one did in ArcMap and yes, you will find bugs from time to time.
The bugs we can report and many of them get fixed with the next update.
And a big plus for ArcGIS Pro: thanks to the auto-backup the loss of data/work is kept to a minimum if it does crash. With ArcMap everything that was not saved was lost for good.

Regarding performance: most ArcMap users run ArcGIS Pro on the same old computer they used ArcMap for, expecting the same performance and barely meet the minimum requirements of ArcGIS Pro. Try running ArcGIS Pro on a machine with the recommended system prerequisites.

[_____]

"The bugs we can report and many of them get fixed with the next update."

I don't believe that for one second. That hasn't been my experience, or any other persons experience that I know. In fact, it's a meme online how terrible Esri is at doing bug fixes in a timely manner.

[MarcoBoeringa · Accepted solution]

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@_____ wrote:

"The bugs we can report and many of them get fixed with the next update."

I don't believe that for one second. That hasn't been my experience, or any other persons experience that I know. In fact, it's a meme online how terrible Esri is at doing bug fixes in a timely manner.

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I do think this quote hits on one important aspect of the issue raised here: ESRI rarely if ever backports bugfixes to the previous major release.

This causes major issues, as it means that, even if a bugfix is introduced "in the next release" (which I agree with you is definitely not a given, and lots of recognized bugs are only fixed after maybe two or three major releases - which is 2-3 years), it may well end up in a version of ArcGIS with a new bug affecting the same functionality.

If that sounds improbable: I have a tool that heavily relies on the Maplex label engine. When ESRI made some major changes to Maplex in ArcMap 10.3 and if I remember well Pro 1.4, I was confronted with unusable labeling results. Reporting back confirmed the issue, and a bugfix was introduced in the next major release, only to introduce a new major issue! I finally had to wait until ArcMap 10.6 and Pro 1.6 for the Maplex labelling engine to be fully sorted out and give proper results...

Best software practices regarding bugfixes require fixes to be backported to previous releases, at the very least the last major release cycle. A fix for an issue in Pro 3.4 should not require upgrading to Pro 3.5, but also be in the Pro 3.4.x cycle.

If you don't do that, you end up with a potentially perpetually broken product, as each new release also inevitably introduces new bugs, and the version users actually use (often the last major one), never gets fixed properly to the extent of being really usable.

I really think if ESRI sorted out the way they handle these issues and dramatically reduce their bugfix backlog, both ESRI support employees and users would see a dramatic drop in the time needed to deal with issues, as rather than seeing the same - unfixed - issue pop-up for the tenth time in the support process, support employees and users would only primarily have to deal with true new issues. There is so much wasted time in the current process, that ultimately also holds back developers and waists their, as some repeated issues will ultimately make it on their plate as well.