Today, Microsoft published an entry on their official "Engineering Windows 7" blog, that discusses how Microsoft goes about dealing with bugs - specifically the so called "showstopper" bug that was reported around the web, and here at Neowin last week.
The blog post discusses in detail the processes used to process major bugs at Microsoft during software development lifecycles, and is written by Steven Sinofsky himself. He says in the post "Pretty quickly, I started getting a lot of mail personally on the report. Like many of you, the first thing I did was try it out. And as you might imagine I did not reproduce both issues, though I did see the memory usage" and that he was not the " ...first Microsoft person to see this. The file system team immediately began to look into the issue."
The post goes on to explain that Microsoft does take the problems seriously, "I did want folks to know just how seriously we take these issues. Sometimes blogs and comments get very excited. When I see something like "showstopper" it gets my attention, but it also doesn"t help us to have a constructive and rational investigation. Large software projects are by nature extremely complex. They often have issues that are dependent on the environment and configuration. And as we know, often as deterministic as software is supposed to be sometimes issues don"t reproduce. We have a pretty clear process on how we investigate reports and we focus on making sure Windows remains healthy even in the face of a changing landscape. With this post, I wanted to offer a view into some specifics but also into the general issue of sounding alarms", explained Steve.
The post offers a great insight into how Microsoft does its processing of bug reports and "major" bugs that are floating around the internet on major news websites and is an interesting read into how the team deals with these sorts of problem. Steve also politely points out where all the hype and fuss about the "showstopper" bug was, and how important it was that people didn"t panic, and that they realized Microsoft treated it seriously.
Windows 7 has been Released to Manufacturing (RTM) - and is currently available on MSDN/Technet and will be publicly available on October 22nd, worldwide.