This has been a busy couple of days for a few of us on the team as we had a report of a bug in Windows 7. The specifics of the issue are probably not as important as a discussion over how we will manage these types of situations down the road and so it seems like a good time to provide some context and illustrate our process, using this recent example.
This week a report on a blog described a crashing issue in Windows 7. The steps to reproduce the crash were pretty easy (1) run chkdsk /r on a non-system drive then crash after consuming system memory. Because it was easy to “reproduce”, the reports of this issue spread quickly. Subsequent posts and the comments across the posts indicated that the issue seemed to have been reproduced by others—that is the two characteristics of the report were seen (a) consumption of lots of memory and (b) crashing.
