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Most of my writing experience over the years has been for big-ticket users
who are not bashful about reporting issues with the systems they buy. They
expect to see release notes for new builds specifically state that an issue
they reported against the previous build has been resolved and list known
issues that have not been resolved yet. I've seen customers write purchase
orders for new products that specify the new purchase is not to be delivered
or billed for until unresolved issues with their existing products have been
cleared. I've also documented a lot of products for regulated markets,
where approvals are often conditional and specify that products may not be
used in certain applications where known issues exist until those issues
have been resolved, and where regulators often assume that a product
submission that has no known issues must mean the submitter is not testing
thoroughly or is leaving something out. In these environments we sell "new
features" and the phrase "improved" is almost never used, because it usually
just tells the readers we didn't get it right the last time.
Gene Kim-Eng
Marguerite said:
> > Most places I've worked would NEVER admit to fixing a problem
> > (because that would imply that their software was buggy to begin
> > with!), but they would let us say that we'd made an improvement.
> > So we could say, for example, "improved system response time...",
> > but not, "fixed a problem where system crashed...."
>
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