SPRs

[William Roberts;]

In <13673 at goofy.Apple.COM> ksand at apple.com (Kent Sandvik) writes:

>In general MacDTS works with registered developer questions, so most of our 
resources
>are working on those questions of natural reasons (they pay for the service, 
so they
>get the major service). Also most of our registered developers are working on 
>important software packages, and as working for a software company everyone 
>knows that quick response is very important, especially in times such as these
>when time-to-market dictates how much you earn.

Uk.DTS is perhaps something of a special case, since the people involved were 
a separate A/UX support organisation prior to taking on DTS as well. Technical 
A/UX questions address to Apple UK or most UK Apple dealers will just get 
passed on to them anyway, so we cut out the "chinese whispers" and go direct.
Remember that Apple on the continental USA is a very different thing from 
Apple out in the rest of the world.

>Anyway, reports at aux.support.com is maybe the most logical place for sending 
bug
>reports. Unfortunately they can't acknowledge every posted bug report, mostly 
due
>to resource limitations as well.

I should like to point out here that i have *never*, *ever* received an 
unsolicited acknowledgement to an SPR sent to reports.aux.support.apple.com.
To get acknowledgements I had to put in a comment to the effect "I am totally 
&#$#!-off with A/UX Beta-N and unless you people start acknowledging these bug 
reports I am going to stop bothering". This is normally good for a message of 
the form "No, no - please keep sending in your bug reports", which at least 
acts as proof that messages are getting through. There was a period of several 
weeks in which all messages to aux.support.apple.com were bounced back by that 
machine after some mixup with the mail system: after pointing this out to 
postmaster at apple.com, I got back a suggestion that I should FTP the latest 
version of sendmail for my system....

>This newsgroup is a great way to make use of the extended A/UX knowledge out 
there in the
>field. Originally Usenet was the feeding ground and inofficial support 
channel for 
>UNIX, and hopefully we could continue to use this newgroup for any kind of 
one-to-many
>support.

>Regards,
>Kent Sandvik, Flatworms Group, DTS

Lots of Apple people are very helpful about answering messages and problems 
raised on this newsgroup. Lots more Apple people are fixing the bugs that I 
(and presumably others) have reported. What is deeply bizarre is that no 
attempt ever seems to be made to tell us that our bugs have been fixed!

This is very bad customer management for the following reasons:

1) It is discouraging to beta testers and diligent customers, because it tends 
to suggest that Apple doesn't care. Beta testing is not fun, and sending bug 
reports into a black hole doesn't make it any better.

2) It does nothing to boost confidence in the product - if you don't have time 
to tell me that you've fixed things then I have to test new releases myself to 
see if the bugs are still there. If I don't have the time to do so then I just 
assume that none of the bugs have been fixed...

3) It wastes customer goodwill and resources. Even judging from recent 
postings, there are a lot of A/UX customers who have a wider and detailed 
knowledge of things like NFS, and who are more than willing to help track down 
problems, experiment with possible solutions etc. You should be making more 
use of us!

It seems to me to be an extremely cost-effective exercise to introduce the 
following small changes to whatever procedures you currently have:

a) When a bug report is accepted or identified as another instance of an known 
bug, tag it with the email address of the sender (there may be several 
different senders) and MAIL THE SENDER to let them know what happened. If you 
can't reproduce the bug, tell me and maybe I'll try harder myself.

b) When a bug gets fixed and signed off, TELL THE INTERESTED PEOPLE that it 
has been fixed and which release the fix is in. Details aren't really 
necessary, just bug title.summary and a release number.

Other people can do this (e.g. Sequent), why can't Apple?
--

William Roberts                 Internet:  liam at dcs.qmw.ac.uk
Queen Mary & Westfield College  UUCP:      liam at qmw-dcs.UUCP
Mile End Road                   AppleLink: UK0087
LONDON, E1 4NS, UK              Tel:  +44 71-975 5234 (Fax: +44 81-980 6533)