We’ve just published our new major release – DXperience v2007 vol 3. As always, we’ve introduced a bunch of new features based on the requests submitted as suggestion items to the Support Center.
However, a lot of suggestions are still not implemented, and we often receive questions on when corresponding features will be introduced.
If you think I’ll finally tell you here WHEN we’ll really implement them, you are wrong. I would love to do that, but it’s simply impossible, since a lot of factors have to be weighed when we make a decision about which features will go to the next major version and which won’t. What I’ll clarify is how treat the states of the suggestions, as well as other issue types shown by the Support Center
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and how you can affect the process of decision making.
Obviously the most common question we hear is what that mysterious “Accepted – TBD” state really means. Well, the Support Center already mentions that “"Accepted - Release TBD" indicates that the suggestion is under consideration and we will discuss its possible implementation in future”. Nice phrase, right?
So, what does it really mean...
It means that we understand the goal, and find that this feature may be useful for other customers. That it really makes sense to implement your suggestion at some point, we want it, and it’s possible from the technical point of view, even if the current product implementation may not allow us to implement it without rewriting it from the ground up.
You see, it’s relatively simple, but involves a lot of factors to build into the consideration, all with knock-on effects…
The next state a suggestion can get is Planned (or even Implemented). According to the Support Center hints they mean:
- "Planned" indicates that we accepted the suggestion for implementation in one of the next updates
- "Implemented" indicates that the suggestion has been implemented and will be included in a future public release
It’s important to understand that “Planned” is usually used when we finally decide that we’re ready to implement this suggestion, and want to include it in the next major version. Though it’s good news to get a notification about changing a request to this state, I would warn against relaying on it – the feature may not be included in the very next major version and it could be that we remove it if it delays the release. It’s actually a rare scenario, and we do our best to set this state only when we know that a feature will be included for sure, but anyway…
Obviously, the next common question is how I can speed up the process and get a shining notification saying “Implemented” ASAP.
To be frank, there is no good way for that. But we offer a “hidden” feature called issues tracking.
Besides the fact that it’s useful to get notifications about issue state changes, we take the total number of trackers into account when reviewing the current “Accepted – TBD” list. Possibly we’ll introduce other ways to affect this process, but I can’t speculate on that right now. What you may wish to do is to track the following suggestions corresponding to this subject:
CS55224 - Vote for suggestions
CS22007 - Points
DS41659 - Display the number of users tracking a suggestion
One more state used for Suggestion items I want to highlight is “Rejected”. Support Center tells us:
- "Rejected" indicates that we did not accept the suggestion and will not implement it
This isn’t an easy one, and we use it when we don’t want to mislead you and give a false hope that we’re continuing to consider its implementation. However, things are changing all the time and we may reconsider our decision at some point, especially taking into account a growing number of trackings for such suggestions.
The rest of state descriptions are mostly self-explanatory except for the following two:
- "Won't Fix" indicates that this is not an bug and we are not going to fix it
- "By Design" indicates that this feature was designed to work in this way.
These are definitely the two hardest ones to use, but Julian made a great job describing them in his Can't Fix? Won't Fix! blog post.
As an addendum, here is the list of remaining states:
"Can't Reproduce" indicates that we cannot reproduce the bug report based upon the information provided and additional details are required - applicable to Bug Report.
"Fixed" indicates that the bug report has been fixed and the fix will be included in the next public release - applicable to Bug Report.
"Answered" indicates that the question has been answered - applicable to Question.
"Insufficient Information" indicates that the information provided is not enough for us to give a complete solution and we need additional information - applicable to Question and Suggestion.
"Duplicate" indicates that this is a duplicated bug report and the Duplicated ID links to it - applicable to all issue types.