The Embarcadero Quality Portal (https://quality.embarcadero.com) now offers specific support for requesting new features for RAD Studio. There is a new issue type "New Feature", beside Bug and Documentation Bug. The fields to fill in a slightly different (like there are no steps), but most of them should be familiar to anyone who has reported bugs. The three issue types for the RAD Studio Project in Quality Portal are visible in the image below.
The new features have a specific flow of operations.
For regular bugs, once they are reported and sent to the internal JIRA system, a QA (Quality Assurance) developer will either ask for more information or approve it and assign to a developer. Later the team will determine the update or release the issue should be fixed.
For new feature, reports get into the internal system and are assigned to PM (Product Managers) who will use them to create the plans for future releases, adding them to an appropriate activity (or Epic, in JIRA terms), attaching a priority, and determining in which release the feature should be implemented. Other options are to indicate there is no plan to implement the feature (closing it) or to put in "on hold" for future consideration. In the first case, this will be reflected immediately in the status of the report, while in the second case the issue will stay open.
There is one more flow, which is very important right now. When a customer reports a bug, the team can determine it is really a new feature request (as it goes beyond the scope of the existing feature). We can change the internal status and this will be reflected in a change from Bug to New Feature in the Quality Portal.
Of course, we'll have to do this for all past issues that have been reported with the bug type, even if they were marked as feature requests in the title or description. We've already started the process, you can see as an example quality.embarcadero.com/browse/RSP-9400, and expect to go over it within a couple of weeks. If you suggested features, you should expect such a notification for your report. Let me know if this doesn't happen. We'll also change the category for issues intended as bug reports: If you disagree let us know. Ultimately, if an issue is a bug or a feature request it doesn't really change the timing for its resolution.
This change should help improve managing feedback from our customers, and even improve our internal workflow. I know this will please many of you who requested it. As a side effect, it will make the separation between feature work and bug fixing (like for an update) more obvious.