Microsoft’s Ladybug system

           One of the recent jobs that I have taken on for my team is being the point man for dealing with bugs from the Ladybug system. I figure that not all of our customers are familiar with the Ladybug system, so I’ll give a quick intro to it.

            In the era of open source it’s vitally important to be able to respond directly to issues raised by customers. The Ladybug system is the tool that we use to deal with customer bugs and suggestions relating to Visual Studio and related technologies. From the front page, you can see the top active bugs and suggestions and search to see if a specific issue already has a bug opened for it. Also, there are link to open up a new bug or suggestion.

            While I’m working on resolving a Ladybug bug, I can keep up a dialog with customers by posting comment to the bug’s page. Here is an example of a specific bug page (Not one of mine). On this page, you can see the original issue raised by the customer, along with any repro steps that the customer wants to provide. Then in the comments section you can see Microsoft respond to the issue raised by the customer. In this case, the bug had already been found by Microsoft and was fixed for the retail release.

            The Ladybug system allows us to deal with customer feedback in a one-on-one basis and also provides us with loads of great new suggestions for our product. If you have some feature that you want to see in Visual Studio hop onto Ladybug and log a suggestion, even if the suggestion gets postponed for this version (we are shipping pretty soon, so most suggestions will) we will remember the issue for the next version of Visual Studio.

            So if you are using Visual Studio (and the Profiler in particular) and you have issues or suggestions for us, log onto Ladybug and file them. And I’ll say thanks in advance for your help in improving our product.