Office 2007 feedback, demonstrates the threshold to participation at work

I have been testing Office 2007 for some time now, seen lots of bugs – but hardly reported any of them – because the process for doing so was way too time consuming.  With office 2007 we get the opportunity to install a couple of taskbar icons smiley and grumpy.  Just click on the appropriate icon, write a few words and you’re done!  This is great, I have logged loads of comments, mostly grumpy ones and today the first follow up emails started to come through from Microsoft.

This utility is a clear reminder to me of the threshold to participation that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.  previously the testers got the threshold way too high so got way too many bugs reported,  now they have it very low and hopefully getting a much clearer indication of the state of their software.  Well done Microsoft! 

This also appealed to me because years ago one of the first systems I developed had a little text box on the status bar where customers could type in a short comment and send it straight back to me,  I learnt a lot from that simple, immediate feedback loop!