You might recall my previous post on how DevExpress Logify is used to deliver crash reports in demos, runtime and design time tools for many DevExpress products and technologies.
I wanted to share another real story and discuss an idea, which may improve your user experience as well.
06/09/2017, we fixed an issue Model Editor - Hidden items are lost after cancelling changes in the Customization Form (private).
06/28/2017 we published v17.1.4 with these changes.
07/03/2017 (5 days later), we received the first Logify report about the "Unable to cast object of type 'DevExpress.ExpressApp.Win.Layout.XafLayoutControlGroup' to type 'DevExpress.XtraLayout.LayoutControlItem'" error, because our manual and automatic tests did not cover one scenario where the new code stopped working.
07/07/2017, we fixed our code and provided intermediate builds with the fix.
Since that fix, we published 17.1.5, 17.1.6, 17.1.7, 17.1.8 updates, but I still see the same reports in Logify from users sitting on the old v17.1.4 and v16.2.8 with that already fixed bug. For instance, one of our users had this crash 17 days ago, because he is still using that v17.1.4 from 06/28/2017:
Now the improvement idea to discuss with you.
Imagine that a crash report in Visual Studio tells you that there is already a fix in the next product version. Or even more, it accumulates your crashes and says that 9 of 10 hits have already been fixed. Would that proactivity make you a little happier and motivate you to install the suggested update?
Imagine that a crash report in Visual Studio tells you that there is already a fix in the next product version. Or even more, it accumulates your crashes and says that 9 of 10 hits have already been fixed. Would that proactivity make you a little happier and motivate you to install the suggested update?
Please tell me a little more on how you make upgrade decisions in cases like the one I described. I know from many users that this is almost always a business decision so they try to avoid updates until there is a strong reason. On the other hand, even though we do not have Logify integrated in runtime libraries for many reasons, the design time experience still appears to take a good part of the overall development time, especially when you work with visual designers like Model Editor, Application and Module Designers, ORM Data Model Wizard, designers for grid and other data bound controls. Or maybe it is already stable enough for your typical tasks so there nothing much to worry about?