Here on the Visual Studio team, our top priority is making your coding experience smoother and more enjoyable. And that begins with truly listening to your feedback. We understand that sometimes sharing your thoughts can feel like tossing bug reports and suggestions into a black hole. It doesn’t feel good, and we get it.But here’s the good news: over the past year, we’ve resolved more bugs reported by users and delivered more requested features than at any other time in Visual Studio’s history. We believe in being open about what happens to your feedback, so in this post, we’ll pull back the curtain and show you exactly how your input is processed and how it directly influences our work.So, grab your favorite warm drink, settle in, and join us for a behind-the-scenes look at how your feedback truly shapes the future of Visual Studio.Every bug report or feature request you submit on developercommunity.visualstudio.com becomes a ticket in our system. We mirror that ticket in our internal Azure DevOps setup and assign it to the right team.[caption id="attachment_255221" align="alignnone" width="1486"] Figure 1: The public ticket on Developer Community on the left, and the internal ticket in Azure DevOps on the right[/caption]We treat your feedback with the same priority as our internal tasks, triaging and prioritizing it to align with our goals and direction. In other words, who created the issue doesn’t matter. If the issue is important and impactful, we consider it.Figure 2: Internal and external tickets are triaged together in the same view in Azure DevOpsSo, what makes a feedback ticket important and impactful? Your engagement on the Developer Community directly influences what we work on next. We assign an internal Score to every ticket based on community traction, impact, and severity. Each vote increases the ticket’s Score and highlights issues or ideas the community cares about. It’s important that you upvote existing tickets and add more context rather than submitting a new ticket for the same issue. Comments add context and boost the Score, helping us understand the issue or feature request’s importance. Comment on existing tickets to add more context to the issue or feature request. It all helps.[caption id="attachment_255223" align="alignnone" width="835"] Figure 3: A bug ticket with votes and comments[/caption]As a ticket’s Score rises, it can automatically escalate in priority - low, medium, or high. Medium and high-priority bugs come with Service Level Agreements (SLAs). High-priority tickets are targeted for investigation within a week, while medium-priority tickets have a longer but defined timeline.Priority isn’t just about votes and comments, though. Our teams weigh the Score against factors like technical complexity and alignment with goals, such as performance, reliability, and accessibility. A high Score doesn’t guarantee top priority, but it’s a major factor.This system ensures that feedback from our users shapes the IDE, and that we catch bugs as early as possible. Some bugs require immediate attention, especially regressions and issues affecting key tenets like performance or accessibility.[caption id="attachment_255220" align="alignnone" width="532"] Figure 4: The option to rollback to a previous version in the Installer[/caption]Regressions - cases where something that used to work breaks - are typically high priority because they disrupt your workflow. If you ever need to rollback to a prior release due to a regression or critical issue, it’s crucial to let us know. After you complete the rollback, Visual Studio asks you to submit feedback describing what led you to revert and the specific problem you encountered.Your input is invaluable for helping us identify, prioritize, and resolve regressions quickly so we can prevent similar disruptions in future updates. Bugs affecting core tenets like performance or accessibility also get quick attention. A slowdown in the IDE or an accessibility issue that limits usability? We prioritize those to keep Visual Studio smooth and inclusive.To help us address your feedback as quickly and effectively as possible, here are some tips for writing a ticket that stands out and speeds up resolution. Use descriptive title: Use a title that is easy for others to find so they can vote, comment, and add more information. Include clear reproduction steps: Describe exactly what you did leading up to the issue. List each step in order so we can follow your process and reliably see the problem on our end. Add screenshots: Visuals make it easier to understand what’s happening. If possible, attach screenshots that highlight the issue or error message. Use the recording function: Consider using the built-in recording feature to capture your workflow and the issue in real time. This gives us a direct view of the problem as it occurs. Share a minimal reproducible project: If you can, create a simple project that demonstrates the issue. Zip up the project files and include them with your ticket submission. This helps us isolate the bug and find a solution faster.Sometimes, we still can’t figure out what’s going on. The team can’t reproduce the issue, or the error logs just don’t give us enough to go on. When that happens, we usually reach out to you and the rest of the community for more details. We’re not trying to be a hassle; we really do want to fix the problem, but we just need a little more info to get there. Anyone can add more info to any ticket, and we encourage you to jump in if you can help. Speaking of feedback, love that Visual Studio fixed the build status after I reported the misleading output and many of you upvoted it. The next text is much better. Your feedback matters!– “.Morten” Nielsen, MVP and Visual Studio user What happens if you want to open a bug on the bug reporting system itself? This is one of the feedback team’s most frequently asked questions. The answer is that you report it the exact same way as any other Visual Studio bug. Go to Help > Send Feedback > Report a Problem… and fill in the ticket.In conclusion…The bug is there whether you tell us or not. But when you take the time to let us know about it, you’re really doing all of us - our team and other users - a huge favor. We know reporting bugs isn’t much fun, but we do our best to make it a good experience.It may not always seem like it, but things are getting better. We’re fixing more bugs and adding more features now than ever before in our nearly 30 years of history. And that’s all because of you. Thank you for all your feedback over the years. It’s made a bigger difference than you can possibly imagine.Keep sharing your thoughts on developercommunity.visualstudio.com and in the comments below.