The triage process gives me hives

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/02/23 10:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/02/23/7850221.aspx

Disclaimer -- most of the examples given here are fictional, and most of the ones that aren't are not schedule bug fixes for any future version.

I post a lot of my opinions here, as regular readers will readily admit.

A lot of my opinions are based on functionality that is less than ideal or missing or wrong or broken or strange in Microsoft software.

Yesterday I was asked by reader Bill whether the blogs themselves were a factor of the process in triaging which features would go in and which bugs would get fixed.

Now obviously in a future version some of those things might be fixed in a future version  of Windows. Not specifically because I am blogging about them but because new versions fix bugs and add features.

Right?

Of course the triage process is people going through the bug list or going through the potential feature request list and choosing what gets in and what doesn't is  a different story.

And I am very pleased that (as far as I know) the process is not influenced by the cleverness of the blog post or amount of detail in it or whatever. Because if they did then I'd be really really unhappy for Windows! :-)

I mean it is all well and good to posit an EqualString function or an internationalized StrCmpLogicalW or  Cantonese input method or new locales in Windows or fixes to bugs. But to find out that my random blathering helped decide to put a bug ahead of some feature or some feature ahead of some locale would frankly scare me a bit.

So my answer to Bill is "damn, I hope not!"

Because the whole process that decides that

• the Klingon locale is less important than collating symbols like numbers;
• the Esperanto font is more important than the Mayan calendar;
• The geek-US locale is less important than a new function to parse vegetables and format them with appropriate international sensitivities;
• the Quenya sort with the Tengwar script is more important than formatting hieroglyphic dates;
• the feature path in the bug is throwing off the group's agility stats;

and so on? All of that just gives me hives. Someone has to do it, sure. But the round-robin of meetings, emails, Product Studio poker, cut this, QFE that, and all of the rest, I just don't want to deal with it until and unless that becomes my job.

I want to make it clear that I do not think this is a waste of time, and I have a lot of respect for the people who do this job well (since in my experience not everyone does!). It just can't be me doing it, that's all.

For now, it is not on the list of things I do, so I am happy to just not weigh in with my two cents.

If they need help knowing whether nw comes before ng in Quenya then they can come by and ask -- I am still very happy to help answer questions, that is just my nature! :-)

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Bulletmagnet on 25 Feb 2008 7:43 AM:

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