Lifting the Carpet

In yesterday's post on fun new ArcGIS Explorer features, I mentioned that I was optimistic AGX's (and other's) bugs would be fixed because of new "positive pressure". The keynote for the 2007 ESRI User Conference indicated that ESRI's internal bug-database would be opened up for public viewing "soon". This is an incredibly gutsy move on ESRI's part, given the presumably very large corpus of existing bugs out there. That said, as a developer I can tell you a great number of application bugs are never reported to the development team simply because (a) users assume developers already know about the bugs or (b) it is hard to send useful bug reproductions. I hope that the open database reveals both to ESRI management what bugs are most "popular" in a much more egalitarian way and that ESRI users are encouraged to actually help developers out.

We regularly report ESRI bugs to the regular support systems, and since roughly 2006, have gotten excellent repsonses from their staff. Yes, we see few of the bugs getting fixed, but beeing able to see progress of bugs, posted workarounds, etc. in a more direct format will be really cool.

I see that there has been a post about it from the ESRI elves. Nothing focuses everyone like clear descriptions of the problems for the community to discuss. This is a truly golden opportunity, and if it survives the year, might make an amazing difference in ESRI's software quality, which would be reason to cheer.