RE: Readme files with references to fixed bugs

[Bevan Mccabe <BMccabe -at- ALTIO -dot- com>]

Hi,

To the other good suggestions that have been added here, I would suggest
listing issues based on priority. Of course, this relies on your bug
tracking system making such distinctions between bugs.
Overall, I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time getting it perfect, and it
depends on your priorities.
You can either go for an exhaustive list of bugs - the customers who are
interested will read it all, and those who aren't will ignore the whole
section regardless of length. Here I would include all high and medium
priority bugs, but skip low ones , which should tend to be more cosmetic
things like typos that you mentioned.

Or, if you want your product to "appear less buggy", you could just keep it
to the customer-reported bugs and those high priority bugs which are likely
to affect the customers.

Also, have you considered asking QA to write this list since they are more
aware of which bugs are important? - though that is buck-passing, of course
...

Finally, have you considered reporting known issues as well as fixed issues?

hope that helps,
Bevan McCabe
Technical Author, Altio
T: +44(0) 20 8580 4538
F: +44(0) 20 8580 2050
bmccabe -at- altio -dot- com
www.altio.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Gilda Spitz [mailto:gspitz -at- longview -dot- com]
Sent: Monday, August 20, 2001 4:37 PM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: Readme files with references to fixed bugs


In addition to books and online help, our Documentation group also
provides readme/release note files.

Up to now, those files have been very simple txt files, describing the
various components of the software, providing contact information, and
so on. If there's a major change since the last release, we mention it,
but we don't provide details.

I have now been asked to provide much more detail on each release.
Apparently some of our users want a bug-by-bug description for each
minor release, so that they can decide whether to upgrade or not. (It's
a complex enterprise-wide product, so they don't necessarily want to
upgrade every time.)

This is my opportunity to change the format from txt to something with
hypertext links - either Acrobat or HTML. And I'm delighted with that.
But I'm struggling to find a way to provide the bug list. 

We have an internal database in which we log bugs (er....issues). There
are sometimes hundreds of issues logged per release, and some of them
are just typo fixes, etc. It would be difficult to decide which fixes
are important enough to be listed, and I really don't think we want to
list them all.

I've been looking at readme files from all sorts of other software, to
get ideas, and that has helped. But I need more input.

Has anyone out there had a similar problem? I'd love to hear your
solution. Thanks in advance.

Gilda Spitz
Manager, Documentation
Longview Solutions Inc. 


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