We really do listen to community feedback

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The other day, we shipped the Smart Client Software Factory April 2008 Release. Before we shipped, I asked the team to audit all the open work items in the queue on the SCSF community site's Issue Tracker and determine what we had fixed.  We had used the items in the Issue Tracker before and during the project, to help guide some of the bug fixes and features.  However, the audit allowed us to do some clean up and ensure we fixed a few things.  Today, I used the results of that audit, and closed a few work items. 

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I did cheat a bit: I used the Visual Studio Team System integration with CodePlex so I could open up the list of all open work items in an Excel spreadsheet and publish changes back to the live Codeplex site.  This made bulk editing a whole lot simpler, and saved me a lot of time. 

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Here are the results of the audit and work item closures:

  • Out of 89 open work items/ issues, we closed 45 today.  A number of these had been fixed in the May 2007 release and never closed, a number were fixed in this release, and some were related to different weekly drops.
  • Out of the top 25 items (by community votes), we closed 13.
  • Looked at another way, we closed 1/2 of the open issues, and 1/2 of the top issues. Not bad.

So, keep up the discussion in our communities.  We reply on the discussion boards, we actually do look at the open work items on occasion, and we do listen to the community.