All of these factors have to be considered. I say that because sometimes the workaround is easy and the fix is incredibly difficult. We will typically first see if there’s an immediate workaround and then determine if a fix makes sense. It may not be impacting many other users, but it’s having a major impact on them. Show-stopping Bugs – Occasionally a user contacts us about a bug that is preventing them from deploying their app to their users. And yet today a large portion of Xojo users build web applications. For example, at the time we added the ability to create web applications, no user had ever asked for that ability. Sometimes we come up with ideas that users have never thought to ask for. While the Xojo IDE is written in Xojo, many of our internal systems are written in Xojo as well. Our Ideas – As you can imagine, we think about Xojo all the time and we use it all the time as well. Most of those cases are almost certainly at the fringes and thus do not affect many people. That there are thousands of open cases doesn’t mean Visual Studio and Xojo are not powerful and useful. closed cases), we are similar but with a team and budget several orders of magnitude smaller. Reviewing Microsoft’s bug base for cases regarding Visual Studio is a good comparison. Every large development tool, even those from teams that are orders of magnitude larger than Xojo’s team, have thousands and thousands of open bug reports. In a small, very focused app, the total number of interactions are few by comparison making them easier to thoroughly test. Why is this? Because development tools generally have such a large number of APIs that the total possible interactions can’t be calculated. It’s important to note that development tools will always have far more open bug reports than most other software. The impact surface (with the exceptions noted below), is what matters. The age of a case is not a criterion for resolving an issue. Many (but not all) of the open bug reports in Feedback only impact a small number of users (and many just a single user) so we focus our attention first on those that impact the most. Cases with a large impact surface will typically be handled before those with a small one. We sometimes get contacted by users asking why a case that was reported and then verified (or reviewed in the case of a feature request) by our team long ago has not yet been fixed or implemented. While this is only one criterion, it’s an extremely important one because it helps us determine the impact surface of any issue. The User Favorites list in Feedback shows the top 100 cases with the greatest number of points. Doing so assigns points to the case with the user’s #1 case getting the most points and #5 getting the least. In Feedback users can specify which 5 cases are most important to them, be they bugs or feature requests. Requests from Users – Feedback is the app we provide to users to make feature requests and report bugs. Supporting an entirely new platform takes longer. A typo in a dialog box can be fixed in seconds. Even in the instance where the impact surface is large, some issues can be resolved quickly while others may take a long time. The greater the impact surface, the more likely the case will be addressed sooner rather than later. The more users affected by a bug or feature and the more enabling or disabling the case may be, the greater the impact surface. The Impact Surface is the benefit in our cost-benefit analysis. Of course most cases are in the middle rather than at the extremes. Something that costs little but provides a lot of benefit is far better than something that will cost a lot but brings little benefit. In business terms this is called a cost-benefit analysis. What we care about most is what will have the greatest benefit to users and what it will cost to provide that benefit. You’ve probably wondered how we decide what features and bugs fixes will be added in any given Xojo release.
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