Summary
- Our Support team will help with workarounds and bug reporting
- We'll generally fix critical bugs in the next maintenance release
- We schedule non-critical bugs according to a variety of considerations
Bug reports
Ricksoft Support is eager and happy to help verify bugs—we take pride in it! Create an issue in our support system, providing as much information as you can about how to replicate the problem you're experiencing. We'll replicate the bug to verify, then lodge the report for you. We'll also try to construct workarounds if possible.
Search existing bug reports
Use our issue tracker to search for existing bugs, and watch the ones that are important to you. When you watch an issue, we'll send you an e-mail notification when the issue's updated.
How we approach bug fixing
Maintenance (bug fix) releases come out more frequently than major releases, and attempt to target the most critical bugs affecting our customers. The notation for a maintenance release is the final number in the version (the 1 in 6.0.1, for example).
If a bug is critical (production application down or major malfunction causing business revenue loss or high numbers of staff unable to perform their normal functions) we'll fix it in the next maintenance release, provided that:
- The fix is technically feasible (it doesn't require a major architectural change)
- It doesn't impact the quality or integrity of a product
For non-critical bugs, the team assigned to fixing bugs prioritises the bug according to these factors:
- How many of our supported configurations are affected by the problem
- Whether there is an effective workaround or patch
- How difficult the issue is to fix
- Whether many bugs in one area can be fixed at one time
Developers responsible for fixing bugs also monitor comments on existing and new bugs, so you can comment to provide feedback if you need to. We give high priority to security issues.
When considering the priority of a non-critical bug, we try to determine a value score for a bug. The score takes into account the severity of the bug from our customers' perspective, how prevalent the bug is, and whether new features on our roadmap may render the bug obsolete. Our developers combine the value score with a complexity score (how difficult the bug is) when selecting issues to work on.