The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

Which Bugs to fix?

I remember Joel talking about when to fix bugs.

Chris Pratley has written two very insighful articles on what goes behind the scene to deliever software as huge as MS Office. I thought I will share this excellent articles with you all.

Check

Watson -
http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2004/02/04/67276.aspx

More on Quality -
http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2004/02/05/67871.aspx

Regards,
JD
http://jdk.phpkid.org

JD
Thursday, February 5, 2004

I'd be even happier if Watson was available to developers for their own environment outside of MS.

Simon Lucy
Thursday, February 5, 2004

JD: fix your webpage, or do not post the address here.

oh, you don't need to fix it, it's not an important bug :)

na/na
Thursday, February 5, 2004

The Watson project looks interesting, especially the comment he makes about this data being made available to ISVs.

Did some more searching, and I think you have to be in their Software Assurance program to be eligible...

http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/programs/sa/support/cer.asp

Nigel
Thursday, February 5, 2004

Corporate Error Reporting (CER) [the link in the previous reply] allows a company to receive and manage error reports from all the systems owned by the company at a site. The company needs to be a volumne licensing or software assurance customer - "CER 2.0 is available starting July 1, 2003 on the Microsoft Volume Licensing Site (MVLS) for eligible Software Assurance customers."

However, Windows Error Reporting (WER) is available to any ISV (for a fee, I believe). The error reports logged by Windows will still be sent to Microsoft, and the error data for your application can be retrieved by your company from Microsoft. You can also submit updates that can be downloaded by end-users through the Windows Update site (although this may only be for drivers, not applications). You may also need to submit your product for Windows certification. Note - I haven't used either of these services so I'm not speaking from direct experience.

There is more information at: https://winqual.microsoft.com/help/wer_help/dev.aspx

Philip Dickerson
Thursday, February 5, 2004

JD, thanks for posting the reference to the Chris Pratley blog. Even as a Java coder, I found it to be very interesting.

Julian
Friday, February 6, 2004

It's quite simple.

Well, first you fix the one that makes your website vanish.
Then you fix the ones that people complain about.
Then you stop before you start ADDING bugs.

If no-one (or not many) complains, then it's not a bug.

AJS
Friday, February 6, 2004