A quick intro and brief evolution of customer bug reporting in Visual Studio.

I'm the test manager of Visual C# and Visual Studio Debugger.  Since starting at Microsoft, I've been interested in customer feedback on our products, which is why I'm involved with MSDN Product Feedback project.  During the Visual J++ betas the bug reporting mechanism was pretty low tech – email and newsgroups, but it was enough to uncover several bugs we wouldn't have wanted to ship.  During VS2002, we had a web site that did the job of gathering bug reports, but it didn’t allow you to see each other’s bugs, search for duplicates or see what happened with your bug.  We used BetaPlace for the Whidbey Alpha which improved the situation.  It created more transparency by synchronizing bug status and resolution and created a channel for a two way “conversation” – but you still couldn’t see each other’s bugs.  MSDN Product Feedback Center has been the biggest improvement so far.   Bugs are now viewable by everyone, which enables searching for duplicates (which saves time for everyone), discussions, posting of workarounds and voting.   

 

My favorite feature is voting because it enables the community to tell us which are the most important bugs.   However, I was surprised that suggestions get significantly more votes than bugs (as of today there are 697 votes for the top 10 suggestions verses 177 votes for the top 10 bugs).  Maybe I should have expected it since suggestions elicit opinions while bugs tend to be more cut and dry such as “Debugger Console window doesn't handle carriage return ("\r")”

 

Why do you think suggestions get so much more attention?

How can we get more votes on bugs so we can differentiate their relative importance?

 

Rusty Miller

Visual C#