Re: AN IMPORTANT MESSEGE FROM SYMBOLICS SOFTWARE SUPPORT

[Paul Pangaro <pan%athena.pangaro.dialnet.symbolics.com@RELAY.CS.NET>]

    Date: Fri, 27 Oct 89 09:51 EDT
    From:     JR@YUKON.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (Johanna Rothman)

    I have no comments about promises and timing that Symbolics has made.  I
    do want to respond to one misunderstanding about our software support effort.
[...]
    [much more deleted]

	In lieu of that, I would hope that at least symbolics would accept email
	bug reports from  subscribers.  The  report should  be acknowledged;  not
	just its receipt, but a comment on status, known workarounds, etc.
[...]
    I've had an incident open for about 6 weeks that the developers were
    completely stymied on for a long time.  If you were the customer I was
    dealing with, would you want to see a response saying "We're still
    stuck, don't know when I'll have something for you, but we're still
    working on it"?  I suspect that might be irritating to a large number of
    users.

For myself the irritation comes from not knowing what is happening, and
the quesy feeling that the issue has been lost into the black hole of
bug reports.

    Do you have recommendations for a procedure when software support takes
    more than a week or two to close a reported incident?

If someone is actually still working on it, the overhead of a reminder
message to the customer should be trivial. I suggest the customer be
told the status of the situation. I wouldn't make this an automatically
generated message, though, because that doesn't satisfy the quesy
feeling....

Best,
PANgaro