I think Garmin needs to be more open with the bug reports.
Over the years, I have worked with a number of software development products, most notably, the Google Earth Browser plugin GePlugin.
I was around when it was first released and immediately adopted it for myStarTraX app.
As with all new complex products, GePlugin contained many bugs, shortcomings, documentation errors etc that we as developers acknowledged and lived with because the basic product was fantastic and Google kept us well informed of their progress on the fixes.
They kept their developers on side by maintaining an informative interactive reporting web site in which every bug report was reviewed by their development team which updated the bug report with the following details:
date reported
tracking number
short title
comments from the developers and users
status indicating the result of their analysis: Bug Confirmed, Enhancement, Documentation error, Out of scope, etc
priority that they attached to the repair work
As updates were released, the status was updated with a description of the fix.
So, you can understand that I, and I'm sure many others of your developer community are underwhelmed by receiving comments from the Garmin team like:
"We have this crash addressed, and the fix will be available in an upcoming mobile SDK release. Thanks!"
"FYI, we've corrected this issue in the documentation. Thanks again for the report!"
"I've got it reported."
"I've got a ticket created to investigate."
Whilst no developer wants to see the shortcomings of their product splashed around to fuel the opposition and critics, all professional developers are aware that it's impossible to release a bug-free, perfect product, and they judge a developer by their responsiveness to this inevitability.
Food for thought?
