Mads Kristensen explains how the Visual Studio team turns user feedback into actionable improvements, detailing the internal workflow and tips for developers to enhance their bug reports.

How Visual Studio Feedback Improves the Developer Experience

Author: Mads Kristensen

Overview

The Visual Studio team emphasizes making the coding experience better by treating community feedback as a top priority. This article pulls back the curtain on how bug reports and feature requests are processed, prioritized, and resolved within the Visual Studio engineering workflow.

How Feedback is Processed

Submission: Developers report issues or suggest features on developercommunity.visualstudio.com. Each submission becomes a ticket in Microsoft’s system.
Mirroring & Triage: Every public ticket is mirrored in the team’s internal Azure DevOps environment. Both public and internal tickets are triaged together, given equal weight regardless of who reported them.
Prioritization: Tickets are reviewed based on community engagement (votes, comments), technical impact, and alignment with team goals (e.g., performance, reliability, accessibility). A Score system reflects community interest — more votes and detailed context increase a ticket’s visibility and priority.
SLA for Bugs: High and medium-priority bugs invoke defined Service Level Agreements, targeting rapid investigation and resolution, especially for regressions or critical incidents.

Community Impact

Community Involvement: Upvoting and commenting on existing tickets help the team assess relevance and impact. Adding context or information benefits both the triage process and the community.
Transparency: The Visual Studio team actively communicates back to the community about which requests have been resolved, strengthening trust and collaboration.

What Makes a Ticket Stand Out

To facilitate rapid issue resolution, the team recommends:

Use a descriptive title.
Clearly detail reproduction steps.
Attach screenshots or utilize the built-in recording feature.
Provide minimal reproducible projects if possible.

Handling Regressions and Critical Issues

Regressions: Bugs that break previously working features are high-priority, often prompting quick rollbacks or patches. Users are encouraged to provide feedback after a rollback to help identify root causes.
Core Areas: Issues affecting overall performance and accessibility are given fast-track attention.

When More Info Is Needed

Sometimes, issues can’t be reproduced immediately, and the team may reach out for more information. Developers are encouraged to continue the dialogue in ticket comments—additional details from any community member are helpful.

Reporting Meta-Bugs

If the feedback system itself is broken, it should be reported like any standard Visual Studio issue via Help > Send Feedback > Report a Problem….

Conclusion

The Visual Studio team credits the community for rapid progress and improved stability. Developers’ willingness to report bugs and vote on issues directly shapes the IDE’s evolution. By understanding the feedback workflow and providing clear, contextual information, developers help accelerate fixes and improvements for everyone.

Your participation makes Visual Studio stronger. Keep sharing your insights and feedback via the Developer Community portal.

This post appeared first on “Microsoft VisualStudio Blog”. Read the entire article here