MSDN Product Feedback Center Blog

We Are Hiring!

2006-02-08T19:04:00Z

The team that runs the Product Feedback Center, in addition to several other customer connection channels, for Visual Studio and the .NET Framework is hiring.

The specific positions we are hiring for are described at the two links below:

Position #1

Position #2

At a high-level, the Transparency, Feedback, and Analysis team has 4 key responsibilities within the Developer Division (DevDiv):

Drive DevDiv to be more transparent with customers
Enable and drive DevDiv to be responsive to feedback we receive from customers (often as a result of increased transparency)
Combine customer feedback with other data sources to create a quantitative end-to-end picture of the developer experience. Use this picture to drive changes to process, technology, and culture.
Work with other stakeholders across the company to ensure that developers have a consistently excellent experience across all of their interactions with Microsoft.

If you are interested, please send me an email.

Thanks,

Scott Currie

Lead Program Manager

DevDiv Transparency, Feedback, and Analysis

More on Connect and Feedback

2005-11-30T23:15:00Z

Corey Snow is one of the developers working on the Feedback portion of connect.microsoft.com. Check out his blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/csnow/default.aspx for the inside scoop on product feedback and Microsoft Connect.

Thanks,
Marie Hagman

Future of the Product Feedback Center

2005-11-29T10:11:00Z

Over the past year and a half the Product Feedback Center has successfully connected customers and Microsoft development teams in a discussion around several products including Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, and SQL Server. The positive response from customers and product teams drives demand to extend this to all Microsoft products and to enable a more robust system that integrates product feedback with other channels such as surveys, downloads, web forums and announcements. The Microsoft Connect site is chartered with meeting this demand.

Microsoft Connect (connect.microsoft.com) is building the next version of the Product Feedback Center and integrating it with other tools to provide a better, more consistent and more unified feedback experience. All existing users and feedback in the MSDN Product Feedback Center will be migrated to the new system next year. In the meanwhile, a small pilot will be conducted with a set of PFC users on the new system. If you would like to participate in the pilot, please send email in that regard via this blog.

The commitment 100% Microsoft responsiveness will continue as we improve the underlying technology and over time we hope to fix a higher and higher percentage of customer reported issues. Many have been waiting for enhancements to the Product Feedback Center for a long time and with great anticipation customers and product teams alike look forward to the progress in this space.

Thanks,

Marie Hagman

Revisiting postponed bugs from Visual Studio 2005 Betas

2005-10-21T22:09:00Z

The Visual Studio 2005 Betas were the first fully public betas with completely public customer feedback at Microsoft. We received roughly 18,000 bug reports and about 8,500 suggestions. We made some tough calls during the Whidbey end-game and had to postpone some customer bugs.

Now that teams are starting to plan for the next version of Visual Studio, we’re reconsidering all the postponed issues from the VS 2005 Beta. We’re reopening all the postponed bugs and will be reresolving them over the course of the next few months.

While we expect that we will be able to fix many of these bugs, we do not expect to fix all of them. Bugs that were postponed very late in the release cycle, or shortly before a milestone release (e.g. beta2) stand a greater chance of being fixed. Bugs that would require a fix that may break applications or run a very significant risk of destabilization will probably not be fixed.

One internal change we are driving is asking people to be honest and decisive in their resolution. If a bug should ever be fixed, fix it now. If the bug does not need to be fixed, resolve it as “won’t fix” instead of postponing it. We sometimes take the easy way out – “I feel bad about not fixing this, so I’ll postpone it and maybe some day we’ll have more time/people and it will get fixed”. The problem with that approach is that we falsely raise expectations (the “some day” rarely ever comes) and we – and now customers – revisit the bug again and again, wasting time.

If we resolve something “won’t fix” and get very strong feedback that it’s the wrong decision, we will revisit it. We welcome your feedback as we work through this.

Thanks,
Marie Hagman

Program Manager

Visual Studio

Should we delay the release of Visual Studio 2005?

2005-08-22T21:37:00Z

If we find Whidbey quality is not ready for a Nov 7 ship we should and will delay shipping. We feel, however, that the product has reached that key inflection point where shipping the huge progress we’ve achieved brings far greater benefit to customers than further delaying to fix a few remaining issues that won’t impact most users.

We opened the Product Feedback Center last year with the release of Beta 1 to empower customers and as a result have received a lot of high quality feedback. We’ve fixed a very high percentage of reproducible customer reported code defects. As VS Client Dev Manager Shawn Burke writes “if you're filing bugs on MSDN Feedback that you really, truely, honestly believe are ship-stopping bugs, reactivate the bug and add your justification as to why you believe that. Write the scenario that's broken and why it's so important, or ask for more information about why it doesn't meet the bar. State that well, and the right things will happen.” See Shawn Burke’s full commentary on this on his blog - http://www.shawnburke.net/Default.aspx?document=264&userinterface=9

Over the course of the Whidbey product cycle we have modified shipping schedules and put new processes in place, to make sure our customer needs are addressed. There is always more to be done and no release is 100% bug free, especially with such a complex product as Visual Studio.

Visual Studio is over 43 million lines of code, there are over 30 teams working on different pieces, with roughly 700 developers checking-in code to 11 different virtual build labs that are then integrated on a rotating schedule producing over 100 different builds of the product daily. In addition we have interdependencies with SQL and MSDN. When we ship an official release like a Beta or RTM (release to market) we lock down and are code complete several months before the actual release date to allow for a final test pass, to stabilize and hit stress goals, then get the best bits to fulfillment for mass production of media. Before code complete there is a long list of exit criteria for the product that must be met, ensuring all key features and scenarios meet expectations. We have customer bug exit criteria to ensure high priority issues are fixed.

Why are we postponing so many bugs? As Shawn says “It's a massive balancing act: how do I ship quality software that will do the right thing for my users and still close it down and get it out the door with known issues? Is this paradoxical? For large software projects, at some point this becomes a treadmill. You could literally keep at it forever if you kept fixing all the bugs. Multiply this by the complexity factor…If you keep perturbing the system, you'll never get there, especially when it comes to sensitive things like stress results.”

Bug triage, where we determine priority and resolution of bugs, can be an unbelievably difficult process in which teams must reach consensus on issues where there are often conflicting considerations. Security, usability, accessibility, integration, would it be a breaking change, is it blocking or a build break… etc. Over 30 people from across the Division meet daily to discuss bugs and fixes ensure the right calls are made in team triage. The Product Feedback Center gives customers a new visibility into this process. You can see how your bug has been assessed against the triage bar and why Microsoft has made the decision to resolve it as Postponed, Fixed, or Won’t Fix. Decisions have been reversed based on customer comments and community vote. Bottom line is we are committed to shipping the right product and through the Product Feedback Center we have an even better sense of what that is.

Thanks,
Marie Hagman
Visual Studio
Program Manager

Important message to Visual Studio 2005 users

2005-07-30T00:11:00Z

At this point in the development cycle you may see a higher number of issues resolved as “Postponed”. Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0 will be releasing soon and teams are working hard to stabilize the code base to deliver the highest quality product as soon as possible. Any change adds the risk of additional bugs, so as we get closer to the ship date we try to minimize the amount of churn across the product. Rest assured we will reconsider every postponed issue for possible incorporation into the next version. Thank you for all the great feedback, you’ve made a huge impact thus far, and please continue to send us your bugs and suggestions.

“Submit” error on Product Feedback Center

2005-05-25T02:43:00Z

Many users have run in to an intermittent problem with submitting bugs or suggestions. After filling out the form, they click Submit and the site crashes or redirects to the home page without actually submitting the issue. This bug with the Product Feedback Center has been reported several times, here’s one example: http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/ProductFeedback/viewFeedback.aspx?feedbackid=e3af9052-e780-4031-90b9-b01c0ffe1a23

The PFC Team is investigating this issue. So far, they have not been able to reproduce the bug internally. They would like to fix this problem as soon as possible since it’s incredibly frustrating for users to lose their work after spending time reporting a bug. If you have had this problem, please post your repro steps here or send them via email. It would be a great help in getting this issue resolved more quickly.

In the meanwhile, I recommend first typing any long bug descriptions and repro steps into a text editor like notepad or Word first and then pasting into the bug report form.

Sorry for the inconvenience and for anyone who’s bug reports where lost. I hope this issue will be resolved soon and that users won’t be discouraged from submitting feedback because of it. The bugs and suggestions we get from customers are extremely valuable.

Thanks,
Marie Hagman

Visual Studio

Program Manager

Bugs and Suggestions Post-Beta 2

2005-05-25T01:57:00Z

Beta 2 released with fixes for many customer reported bugs and we also implemented some new features based on popular customer suggestions.

Now, with every day that passes, the bar for changes to the product goes higher and higher. Every change to the code base requires careful risk scrutiny as to how much potential instability it adds, what its impact on user experience is, whether there’s a simple workaround, etc. We are at the point in the product cycle where we want to fix the worst bugs and increase product stability. This enables us to ship which in turn enables a lot of customers to start releasing their Whidbey-based products.

So what does this mean for customer suggestions? Most new feature requests will be postponed to the next version. When we open the product bug database for Visual Studio v-next, all the postponed bugs and suggestions from Whidbey, will be ported and reopened. So please continue to submit suggestions and vote on existing suggestions and know that postponed suggestions will be revisited.

Marie Hagman

Visual Studio

Program Manager

Beta 2 coming soon

2005-04-16T01:55:00Z

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 will be releasing soon and with many customer bug fixes and suggestions incorporated. Hundreds of bugs were fixed only because they were found and reported by customers. We've fixed about 75% of the fixable customer reported bugs, this is the same fix rate as fixable internally reported bugs.

We'll be taking a short break on the Bug of the Week Award and resume the program sometime after the Beta 2 release.

Thanks,
Marie Hagman

Bug of the Week

2005-04-06T23:22:00Z

This week's "Eagle Eye" Bug of the Week Award goes to MSDN Product Feedback Center user “JoeF” for the bug:

Arithmetic operation resulted in an overflow with Int32

This is an interesting hard to find bug. The CLR team is looking at fixing this issue in the next release. Thanks for helping make Visual Studio a better product and keep the great feedback coming!

Marie Hagman

Visual Studio

Program Manager

Bug of the Week

2005-03-31T05:04:00Z

This week's Bug of the Week Award goes to MSDN Product Feedback Center user “Pasi Heinonen” for the bug:

Circular base class dependancy crash the Visual Studio

From Cyrus Najmabadi, Software Design Engineer on the C# team:
"Interesting bug. As one might have guessed from the repro steps we got into an infinite loop when searching for the list of overridable methods, had a stack overflow and the program terminated. This was a bug we saw quite a bit in the VS2003 time frame. Far too much code assumed that it was safe to walk our symbol graph arbitrarily because it thought it was in some canonical form (like where no loops existed). In VS2005 I removed pretty much all occurrences of code like that and replaced it with objects that could walk the graph and not run into problems like that. i.e. Depth and breadth searchers that could be utilized by other algorithms in the language service.

Unfortunately this area was missed and I'm glad that it was caught since it's so disastrous. Thanks much to the community for reporting to us on this!"

Marie Hagman

Visual Studio

Program Manager

Bug of the Week

2005-03-24T00:23:00Z

This week's Bug of the Week Award goes to MSDN Product Feedback Center user “PGomersall” for the bug:

Starting MS Outlook 2003 starts C# Express installer

Thanks for helping make Visual Studio a better product and keep the great feedback coming!

Marie Hagman

Visual Studio

Program Manager

Bug of the Week

2005-03-16T15:13:00Z

This week's Bug of the Week Award goes to MSDN Product Feedback Center user “Marina” for the bug:

Designer not generating correct code - code cannot compile.

We appreciatey your persistance on this issue and the effort made in getting us the attachment. Thanks for helping make Visual Studio a better product and keep the great feedback coming!

Marie Hagman

Visual Studio

Program Manager

Suggestion of the Week

2005-03-07T21:18:00Z

The Suggestion of the Week Award goes to MSDN Product Feedback Center user “Mike Taulty” for the suggestion:

RSS Feed for Top Rated Bugs

Thanks for helping make Visual Studio a better product and keep the great feedback coming!

Marie Hagman

Visual Studio

Program Manager

Bug of the Week

2005-03-01T07:49:00Z

Last Friday's Bug of the Week Award goes to MSDN Product Feedback Center user “JDM” for the bug:

Right shift of a literal int produces logical instead of arithmetic shift

Thanks for helping make Visual Studio a better product and keep the great feedback coming!

Marie Hagman

Visual Studio

Program Manager