Sort of an SPR-Jam?
Sounds like a simple idea, very little work for IBM, up to us to persuade our customers to weigh in

Exactly, Christopher. I think this would encourage the customers in getting even more involved in the product.
We are entering the Social era of software, well I think this would be a nice application of it.

AVP support contracts have something along the lines mentioned above:

{ Link }

Just to correct as well. The "weight" in relation to SPR's/PMRs is not correctly detailed.

More customer reports added to an SPR does not guarantee it will be given more priority over those with less/no weight. The "weight" that support may talk about has no relationship to other SPRs. It gives more visibility to the SPR in development, but it wouldn't automatically push an SPR with no customer reports off the list to be fixed.

So if I understand this correctly, it is even more blurry for customers to know if and when fixing will be done...
That would be one more good reason to get better insight for customers (and involvement in prioritizing), no?

Agreed that there should be some sort of easy way for customers to push certain "bugs" to be visible, thus enhancing the chance that it would be fixed.

@Mathieu, It is only blurry if you still think the "weight" has anything at all to do with an SPR being fixed or not.

There are a huge number of factors in relation to an SPR being fixed. Time/cost to make the fix (in relation to fixes for areas of that development team). Risk/impact to the whole product. Architectural changes required to implement that fix. Amount of testing involved to verify the fix vs a shipping release date.

There are more factors then that, but that is just an example.

Same reasons why hot fixes that paid support can get you will sometimes never make it into a next release (or any release in some cases).

@Tinus. The closest to what is requested above I can find is this:

{ Link }

This will show you all public SPRs. Using that as far as I know the online support site allows you to subscribe to APARs (which is basically giving a customer report to an SPR).

The AVP program allows you a bit more depth in getting details on those SPRs, as well as non-public ones that developers may report.

@Simon, I am well aware of the issues/factors you raise, believe me. Having opened numerous PMR's over the last 10 years, I perfectly understand the implications. Not all problems are easy to solve, or economically viable, ... or maybe even more important and which you didn't mention, a bug which is important in my eyes maybe isn't in the eyes of my neighbour. All make sense. But that is not my point. Not all problems raised by customers are of that kind.

I'll give you a simple example, take this idea from this site (there are dozens of other similar examples available here) : { Link }
This is typically a bug which must take let's say (please allow me a caricature here ;-) 3 lines of code to get a warning pop-up, will never break backwards compatibility we some much appreciate in Notes/Domino; and so on ... .

Please go and explain a customer that a software that is on the market for 20 years (and which is brilliant according to me, don't get me wrong) has
a) no plans to fix this (although it exists for ages)
b) if the customer really wants to get it fixed he/she will have to open a PMR because the SPR may exist, may exist but non publicly or simply not exist at all. So opening a PMR is as far as I know the only way to make sure. You cannot subscribe to an APAR for a problem that is maybe existing but not published. Moreover, for such type of bugs, a customer will never agree that they should spend time (opening a PMR does take time) asking for it to be solved. On the long run, their only conclusion will be "it's a crappy piece of software, let's move to something else". This is what I have already heard several time on the floor. By the way, I have actually opened a PMR for above issue. The SPR did not exist or was not publicly available. Result of the PMR : I have no clue at all if it ever will be fixed... . You can imagine the customer's reaction.

Again, I am not trying to demolish the SPR/APAR way of doing here. My point is not to throw out the baby with the bath water. But my experience with my Notes/Domino customers (150 over time) is that there should be a (complementary ?) much more easy, quick and visible way (IBM Connections for instance ?) for them (given they've paid their maintenance of course) to let IBM know that these bugs really bother them, that they need it to be corrected (that doesn't necessarily mean today). Furthermore, let's say you subscribed to the APAR, you still have no clue if or when your issue will be considered for fixing. Customers do get frustrated by this.

By the way, "@Mathieu, It is only blurry if you still think the "weight" has anything
at all to do with an SPR being fixed or not." ==> this is what you get told by IBM support itself.

For SPR's available on the support portal, a "I have this problem too" button to increase the weight would be nice and easy too.
But that doesn't give a solution for 'hidden' SPR's...

@Mathieu is absolutely right - whether or not more customers reporting or 'promoting' the SPR adds weight to it, it should certainly add to the visibility
And @Thibaud's suggestion is brilliant - it's simple to use, simple to understand, simple to code. It adds a metric to the support dev teams when it comes to prioritising APARs that wasn't there before

Y'know, we are on ideajam. It's possible we might convince ideajam to open an area specific to SPRs.