Re: Documenting bugs in East Asia?

[Kimberly Ferri Cakebread <kim -at- ASPECTDV -dot- COM>]

I've worked at two companies in the US, each of which had very different
approaches to publishing information about bugs.  The first didn't mention
bugs at all.  "Bug" was definitely a dirty word.

At the second company, I was very surprised when I was asked to include a
list of known bugs in the release notes.  Later, I created a separate doc
for listing resolved and existing bugs.  However, note that these documents
can be very damaging if they get into the hands of the competition.

Kimberly Ferri Cakebread


At 05:14 PM 2/3/98 +0800, you wrote:
>I was talking to someone who has worked in software sales and support
>in a couple of countries in Southeast Asia. We were discussing release
>notes and she told me that it's *not* customary to acknowledge bugs.
>
>For example, customers would not expect to see a section on known bugs
>and workarounds, or a list of bugs in previous versions that are fixed
>in the new release. She said the international software companies that
>operate in the region are aware of this and tailor their release notes
>accordingly.
>
>I made the point that our end-users in Australia would tend to be quite
>cranky if they spent a few hours trying to get something to work, only
>to discover from the help desk that it's a known problem. She responded
>that customers in Asia generally expect that if they buy something it
>works, and they wouldn't spend a lot of exploring a problem, they'd
>expect their dealer to help.
>
>Has anyone else encountered this? We only operate in some countries, so
>I'd be interested to know whether this is generally true in East Asia
>or whether it's specific to some cultures.
>
>One possibility is to have two sets of release notes, one that mentions
>bugs, fixes and workarounds, and one that doesn't. Another is to send
>the full set of notes to each dealer so they can customise them for
>their own market. To some extent I can rewrite bug fixes to sound like
>new features, but I worry that one day I'd wake up and find myself
>writing up circumlocutory 'known issues' for Microsoft, or working as
>President Clinton's press secretary.
>
>Regards
>---
>Stuart Burnfield                "Fun, fun, fun
>Functional Software Pty Ltd     In the sun, sun, sun. . ."
>mailto:slb -at- fs -dot- com -dot- au
>
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