256: Improvements to Sibelius

This is a summary of our policy on programming new features and bug fixes to Sibelius.

Suggesting improvements

We welcome suggestions for improvements to Sibelius from users. It is best for you to put these on the chat page, but you can also email/fax/post them to technical help. We collate suggestions from a wide variety of sources, add them to an extensive database, consider them carefully and prioritize them when developing new versions.

Almost all suggestions we receive have in fact been thought of before – we do not often receive a completely new idea. Nonetheless it is useful for users to provide suggestions even if an idea is not new, as it help us assess how popular the feature would be.

We do not announce what improvements will be in the next Sibelius version much in advance, because these are not finalized until fairly close to the release.

For improvements to the User Guide, please put them on the chat page or email userguide@sibelius.com.

Prioritizing improvements

Improvements to Sibelius – i.e. new features and bug fixes – are programmed in order of priority. We prioritize improvements using a number of factors, including:

• Number of existing users and potential future users affected by the improvement
• How important the improvement would be to users affected by it
• How time-consuming the improvement would be to program. (Some minor improvements are very quick to program when done at the same time as other major improvements in the same feature.)

When prioritizing improvements we are very aware that Sibelius is used by a wide variety of different people, each of whom has different requirements. Please bear in mind when suggesting an improvement that something which may be important to you may be unimportant to most other users, and vice versa. We also cannot go into detail about why a particular suggestion has or has not been implemented in a particular version.

The time elapsed since a suggested improvement was made is not usually a consideration. Hence if a user suggested a new feature two years ago, it is not thereby given higher priority than something suggested yesterday.

Bugs

Sibelius is generally extremely stable, though like all software it has some bugs, which we try to eradicate.

Strictly speaking, a "bug" is when a feature does not work as described in the manual. It is not a "bug" if Sibelius lacks a feature which you would like. Some users regard almost anything as a bug, e.g. "it's a bug that Sibelius does not do such-and-such automatically?" this is a feature request, not a bug.

Roughly half of apparent bugs are not due to Sibelius but to bugs in Windows, Mac OS, printer drivers, etc., particularly as a result of the huge range of different computer configurations now in use. We cannot directly fix these bugs as they are in third party software/hardware, but we can usually work around them, such as by making Sibelius do whatever it has to do a different way, or by telling you (say) to update your printer driver to the latest version.

Fixing a bug in Sibelius is not necessarily higher priority than adding a new feature; it depends on the seriousness of the bug. For example, some bugs only occur in rare situations and are easily worked around. But bugs which affect a significant proportion of users or which have serious effects are generally treated as high priority.