So, will this increase the pace of development? I mean there's almost going to be a exponential increase in tickets, and the same amount of tickets readers...
I'd hate to be in the support queues compiling the info right about now.
There are going to be at least 3 different sources of "bugs" that will input into the fix/stabilisation process: tickets raised by people, crash logs submitted, and anything raised on the servers that we don't see directly.
For tickets I guess there will be a first pass to find the interesting/high priority stuff, then a second pass to de-duplicate once most of the core issues that have been identified. A core issue can be looked at straight away and doesn't need the ticket de-dupe to complete first, and really that is another way of saying that multiple tickets will map down into a single defect fix.
For crash logs and server failures there are probably going to be some kind of "volume" measured against a signature for each crash report (the crash location in the code is a good place to start). Volume can then identify a priority list of critical defects that need to be fixed.
There's a fairly high rate being reported at the moment - I've raised two tickets earlier today about 80 minutes apart with a difference of 37 on the ticket numbers. For Frontier to go ahead with the beta suggests they're expecting roughly the same number of reports to deal with for the increased number of users - the benefits of alpha testing with a smaller group showing that the support process is also robust
There's always a spike when there's a new release and the forums will calm down some of the volume as the issues are reported out and people find that they are "not the only one". So reading the forum after you've found an issue, and posting to the forum once you've raised a ticket is a good thing to be doing
Ian.
