One of the most annoying things with beta testing is having your feedback ignored. Whether you are testing for a big company, small company or even a friend the last thing you want is your time to be wasted. I have to admit that in my testing for Microsoft in the past I had some very good feedback from them and knew that they took reports seriously. With Windows 7 however I was getting worried that they were wasting peoples time because there was so little reported about bugs reports received and fixed.
Today Microsoft finally released some of the figures for bug reports received and fixed as a result. A staggering 500,000 bug reports were submitted and more than 2,000 have been fixed. This is on par with what was fixed with the Windows Vista beta however Microsoft received substantially less reports on Vista. The biggest contributing factor is actually not how many people were beta testers but with how easy it is to submit a bug report.
With Windows 7 there are links in almost every applications title bar as well as a shortcut on the desktop where it is very easy to fill out and send in a bug report. Windows Vista required a separate application to be downloaded and installed to allow for feedback. Whether the quality of reports is very good with Windows 7 could be debated but I would bet on the quantity of reports do help with the priority of things to be fixed.
Check It Out> DailyTech via Engadget
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