In less than 2 months since Microsoft released the beta version of its upcoming Windows 7 to the public, Microsoft received more than 500,000 feedback reports and planned fixes for more than 2,000 bugs found in them.
"Let's talk a bit about 'bugs'. Up front it is worth making sure we're on the same page when we use the much overloaded term bug. For us a bug is any time the software does something that someone one wasn't expecting it to do," Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president for the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group explained. "A bug can be a cosmetic issue, a consistency issue, a crash, a hang, a failure to succeed, a confusing user experience, a compatibility issue, a missing feature, or any one of dozens of different ways that the software can behave in a way that isn't expected. A bug for us is not an emotional term, but just shorthand for an entry in our database representing feedback on the product. Bugs can be reported by a human or by the various forms of telemetry built into Windows 7. This broad definition allows us to track and catalog everything experienced in the product and do so in a uniform manner."