As a long time product manager, one of my pet peeves is the bug/hotfix process. Stepping back, we have a well defined triage process, where a good team of dev, support, and support engineers (as well as myself) sit in a room, and agree on priority, severity, and even whether it is a defect, or just desired different behavior requested. This works well.
Issues are brought in, verified, assigned severity (and if there is a work around, that lowers the severity, as you would expect), and tossed into the queue.
The maintenance team, 3 developers, then pull items from the queue in FIFO with some stack ranking due to priority. At any one time we have 30 – 60 issues in queue.
What this rant is about is the constant badgering I get from sales. “When will issue X be done?” “Why isn’t {insert pet issue} done yet”, “I am going to go to the division GM if you can’t give me this this week”, among other less printable comments.
As there is a queue, and it is ranked by priority and severity, we get to them as we get to them. We do not make duse dates available. I will not commit to more than “It is in the queue, and the team will address it”.
Sigh, I seem to lose 2 hours a week in these pointless discussions. I have an idea, why don’t you find a bug in Windows, and call Microsoft support. See how much “pull” you have there.
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