bug reports

[Johanna Rothman <JR@YUKON.SCRC.SYMBOLICS.COM>]

I don't have completely accurate information from this past year.  Below
are some comments based on my experience as a Symbolics employee and as
the manager of the Corporate Software Support function.  Since I'm only
involved in the Software Support organization peripherally, the Software
Support people may be able to provide better answers than I can.

We receive 2 kinds of bug reports, email and phone. For September, (USA
only) we received a total of 326 phone incidents and 127 email
incidents.  That's a grand total of 453 incidents for September.  This
number may be a little light, but it is within 15% of our heavier
months.  These incidents do not include the S-Products, Color or
bug reports from our international subsidiaries and distributors.

    Date: Tue, 31 Oct 89 12:12:05 MST
    From: andreas@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Andreas C. Lemke)

    Could somebody give an indication of the number of bug-reports we are
      talking about?  (I can understand if Symbolics doesn't want to
      publicize some of this information!?)

    Do the numbers vary a lot?

See above for these two questions.  We can call it a high average of 500
incidents per month, and not be too far off.

    What is the distribution across the different software systems?

There isn't even distribution of questions within a month.  Some months
we get mostly layered product calls.  As an eyeball number, more than
half the incidents are in systems contained within Genera, not the
layered products.

    How many reports are misunderstandings by the customers?

Again, as an eyeball, maybe up to 20% of the incidents. That's probably
a high estimate.

    What percentage of the bugs are fixed within a couple of weeks or so?

I can't tell from the data I have.  I think that more than half,
probably more than 60% are answered within one week.  Once you get past
one week, it may be closer to three weeks before an incident is closed.

    What percentage of bugs are fixed in the next system release?

There are really a few answers here:
  - There is no patch, and the bug is fixed in the next release.
  - There is a patch and the bug is fixed in the next release.
  - This bug report showed us a new bug which is now one of the above.

I would like to think that there are a large number of bugs which are
fixed in the next release, whether there is a current patch or
workaround, but I have no data to verify this.  The quick answer is that
a high percentage of bugs is fixed in the next release, but that may not
be the case when you initiate your bug report.  We definitely fix bugs
based on bug reports from our customers.  Maybe I don't understand the
question.

    How many feature requests do you get? (I would like to see more discussion
      about important desirable features here on slug.)

I think less than 10% of our incidents are feature requests.