Qt Support Workflow

A team of first-line support engineers reviews all incoming support requests. Mails that open a new issue are assigned a new issue number (or multiple issue numbers if appropriate), and responded to immediately if the first-line engineers can provide an answer immediately. If the issue requires some researching it is assigned to a second-line support engineer. In this case, an automated response with the issue number is generated.

Mails that follow up on an existing issue are automatically added to the respective conversation. The support engineer assigned to the issue will communicate with the customer until the problem is resolved, the suggestion is fully understood or the bug identified and reproduced.

Priority support incidents are prioritized in this process.

Confirmation

If the conclusion of this conversation is that a modification of a product is required (bug fix, implement suggestion etc.) the support engineer will generate a new task for the development team. A selection of those tasks generated for the development team are made public through our Task Tracker.

Scheduling and Prioritizing

A team of Qt engineers will review those issues regularly, and priorize and schedule them based on severity of the issue for the customer reporting, and impact of the defect on the product affected. Priorities rank from P1 to P5, with P1 being the highest priority. An issue can be scheduled for the next maintenance release, the next minor product upgrade, or registered for a future product version. Typically, the following types of changes will be scheduled for the next maintenance release (x.y.z+1):

• Fix bugs caused by changes to previously working code
• Fix build issues on supported platforms
• Fix defects specific to a single platform that are not present on other platforms
• Fix critical defects, including (but not limited to): crashes, data corruption, loss of data, race conditions
• Update documentation and license information when deemed necessary

Non-critical fixes that do not meet the above requirements will be reserved for later product versions, as the risk of destabilizing is greater than the benefit.

Resolution

The Qt engineer assigned to the issue will make the changes as scheduled, ordered by priority. Changes in existing code will be reviewed, and have to pass the regression tests before becoming available in the daily snapshots. New functionality will be made available in the earliest pre-release of the new product version.