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Paul Donnelly from the Windows Betateam enters the stage of the Vista RTM lab. He explains that he is responsible for the various initiatives at Microsoft that are conducting betatests and gathering information on “unfinished” software (beta software) from internal and external testers. His team also receives and evaluates information from the “Customer Experience Improvement” feature built into Windows Vista. This piece of technology has been activated by default and makes Vista send out information on errors and on the product version to Microsoft. Vista also sends out a message when devices have not been recognized in order for Microsoft to get in touch with the manufacturer. Paul explains that no further information (such as personal user data) will get to Microsoft in order to prevent warming up discussions on the antiquated “Microsoft-spies-on-me”-BS (pardon me) again.
Betatesters were able to send out tens of thousands of bugs between the end of 2005 and the end of 2006 to Microsoft. Paul elaborates that over 16 people at Microsoft are solely responsible for gathering the feedback, prioritize it and get it to the product teams. He states it is often hard to reproduce bugs or certain machine configurations of the testers out there: What kind of hardware did he/she use? What software is installed? Which driver versions? What kind of special configuration or settings have been used?
To solve these problems it sometimes takes even 1-2 weeks to reproduce a simple but very seldom problem like a non-closable Task Manager in a certain Windows Vista test build. A lot of these problems are not even caused by Microsoft but by incompatible drivers and applications that have either been poorly written or not optimized for Windows Vista.
Not only bugs have been solved that way. Microsoft gathered a lot of feedback on a lot of disruptive factors in the system such as the frequency of User Account Control messages that are popping up when you try to do something “dangerous” and unsecure. With this data they were able to reduce the amount of messages immensly and not disrupt the work with your machine too much.
Paul goes on and explains that in several instances employees were fired when they did not take the feedback and the bug reports seriously. This time Microsoft takes the “fit and finish” work of Windows Vista much more serious than in previous installments of the operating system. However, one thing that he told me bugged me a little bit: The feedback program is officially closed now. So it is not possible to send bug reports to Microsoft over this channel anymore. However, apparently they opened up a new program that gathers feedback for future versions (such as Windows Vienna).
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