As many you may have heard, we've opened an online bug-tracking interface that allows customers to enter and track bugs. The codename for this project internally has been "Ladybug". It has been an interesting experiece so far. There has been a decent amount of hand-wringing about Ladybug around the halls of Developer Division. See, before I worked at Microsoft I assumed they just had enough money and resources to overcome any situation. Well, it turns out that just like any other company, we have to make do with often limited resources. And in the case of something like Ladybug it becomes a question of scaling; at what point does just the processing cost become larger than the people you've got to do the work.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's really a great thing and I think it's going to really help customers feel more part of the process and we will ship a higher quality product becuase of it. We've already gotten a couple of fantastically well-entered bugs about issues that we, honestly, probably would have never caught. As of right now, it looks like Windows Forms has gotten about 90 customer bugs since Ladybug went live on Wednesday, 6/29. As far as the bugs go, it's no problem. They're either bugs that we've already found and/or fixed, ones we would find or fix, or ones we'd like to (since a customer found them) so that's all goodness. Fortunately the 'quality' of issues I've seen come through so far seems to be fairly high.
So we'll see how it goes. For smaller teams like ours I'm a little concerned about the processing time. Say it takes 10 minutes for someone to understand, repro/verify, and assign a bug out, that adds up very quickly. If the incoming rate continues (looks to be about 20/day so far) or increases it could get tough, simply because the issues aren't part of our normal process as we want to get some sort of an answer back to the customer sooner rather than later. That's different from internal issues which, assuming they're not critical, we work through based on priority or severity rather than age. So it's not just a straight-on add to the normal bugs. But, again, it's the right thing to do so we'll adjust. And even if it takes us a little longer to deliver a product that our users are more invested in and satisfied with, that's not so bad either.