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How Apple Plans to Root Out Bugs, Revamp iPhone Software

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Re: How Apple Plans to Root Out Bugs, Revamp iPhone Software

#191

Post by oillio »

avar wrote: post #175
bri3d wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have existed teams at every company I have ever worked for who argue that this is the Very Best Way (tm) to develop code. It allows for the True Gatekeepers to keep their hold over the perceived software quality and quickly routs any sort of outside interest from modifying the project in any way the True Gatekeepers don't desire. In entirely broken organizations this is an effective way to allow 2-3 good develo…

Git itself is developed this way, so saying it could be fixed by "real revision control" is silly. Maybe you worked with someone who misused this model, but there's good reason Git and Linux use it.

I think the OP covered this argument with is comment about Linus' "benevolent dictatorship."

That is an extreme outlier. If your organization is run by someone like Linus, it can work, maybe.

Re: How Apple Plans to Root Out Bugs, Revamp iPhone Software

#192

Post by vlovich123 »

fastball wrote: post #134
coolwhhip wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shipping gets you power and influence. Outside of personal conviction and judgement, there’s not incentive to do much else.

Right, but engineers probably are going to have some level of conviction and judgement when it comes to something they helped build. They're personally invested in a feature they've worked on. If I was an engineer at Apple who worked on iMessage, and I heard acquaintances talk about the bugginess about iMessage, I would probably start out being defensive but then I would regret that we didn't ship a better product. I…

It's easy to blame "the other". Having worked at Apple I never felt like it was the EPM causing quality issues for us. It was us setting an aggressive schedule ourselves and, more importantly, having poor testing. The EPM was mainly just making sure tasks didn't get missed, reprioritizing them as the schedule moved based on discussions with managers & other engineers etc. Sure at some point in the schedule the central EPM committee for a release would start locking things down & punting less critical issues, but that's something that's done for every single release even for engineer-driven companies because you have to ship at some point.

Keep in mind also that these EPMs themselves tend to be fairly competent engineers in their own right so these aren't MBAs making decisions, they've just moved on as their career evolved. They care about quality just as much as anyone. The difficult part is making the call of cutting a feature especially if it's a keynote feature because there's just not enough time to actually ship it because that's predicting the future. Another difficult call is what bug constitutes a delay of an OS release, especially when the bug report may not have the necessary details to indicate it might be more critical than it seems.

TLDR: It's not as easy as saying it's all the EPMs fault. There's plenty of blame to go around because nobody is perfect & predicting the future (which is what scheduling is) is very hard.

Re: How Apple Plans to Root Out Bugs, Revamp iPhone Software

#193

Post by abalone »

pdpi wrote: post #159
abalone wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breaking: Engineer Thinks PM is a Bozo. Film at 11. It's not really context. The real problem here is the premise that "Apple has software quality issues" is taken as a given, without support. Sinofsky makes the point that Apple is operating a such a huge, unfathomable scale and depth -- and this is coming from one of Microsoft's top guys in its heyday -- that even rare bugs that affect 0.01% of users translate into…

It's not "Engineer thinks PM is a bozo", it's a post explaining a very concrete, objectively negative behaviour from the PM team. I've worked at companies where that sort of behaviour was rampant, I've worked at places where it wasn't, and the difference in the end product is palpable. Second, even if it's just anecdotal, I have personally been experiencing issues with my tMBP at work that I haven't had with any prev…

> even if it's just anecdotal... there does seem to be some measurable degradation in their Apple's standards as of lately

You just characterized anecdotal evidence as "measurable". That's exactly the logical fallacy at work here.

Non-anecdotal evidence of Apple's quality standards: The super long iPad upgrade cycle. It's stretched out and impacting Apple's bottom line because >3 year old iPads still work perfect.

Re: How Apple Plans to Root Out Bugs, Revamp iPhone Software

#194

Post by lou1306 »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #160
masklinn wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Based on your experience there what would you say is the cause of the recent slip in software quality in both iOS and macOS? It's not clear because there have been absolute shit-show releases going back to the early days of OSX. Even the fondest-remembered releases were only so after a ton of polish, and that was with releases slipping significantly (you might see 3 years pass between major updates, and the new ver…

What has definitely changed is the pace with which people are expected to upgrade. When OS X Snow Leopard came out, you had to visit a store to buy the DVD. Nobody would look down on you for running a "legacy OS" if you only upgraded when .3 was out. The ways in which this has changed affect both tech-savvy and casual users: 1. Older versions of iOS (which didn't exist back then) don't receive security fixes, so the…

> If you are moderately paranoid about security, you have to install all updates on day one

Until you don't (see High Sierra and the "empty root password" fiasco).

Re: How Apple Plans to Root Out Bugs, Revamp iPhone Software

#195

Post by newscracker »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #160
masklinn wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Based on your experience there what would you say is the cause of the recent slip in software quality in both iOS and macOS? It's not clear because there have been absolute shit-show releases going back to the early days of OSX. Even the fondest-remembered releases were only so after a ton of polish, and that was with releases slipping significantly (you might see 3 years pass between major updates, and the new ver…

What has definitely changed is the pace with which people are expected to upgrade. When OS X Snow Leopard came out, you had to visit a store to buy the DVD. Nobody would look down on you for running a "legacy OS" if you only upgraded when .3 was out. The ways in which this has changed affect both tech-savvy and casual users: 1. Older versions of iOS (which didn't exist back then) don't receive security fixes, so the…

> 3. iOS and macOS automatically download OS upgrades and nag you to install them.

This annoys the hell out of me. So much so that I feel like throwing the device every time it happens. What a waste of energy, storage, and network data limits! I've had to delete the iOS 11 download on my device manually several times already. I make sure WiFi is off whenever I'm charging for fear that it would automatically install the update too (not sure about this) and would not be able to revert back.

If anyone on the iOS team is reading this, I'm not moving out of iOS 10 unless you provide a way to turn off the WiFi radio from Control Center (not just disconnect from the network and connect automatically when I'm in a different location, which is not what I want). And also fix the slowness issues with iOS 11. I have it on an iPhone 7 and the performance is bad. I can't spend several hours erasing the device, reinstalling the OS and re-downloading all the apps (several tens of Gigabytes) once again now that you've not only removed app transfer and sync with iTunes but also removed the apps section from it. Stop assuming things about people's connectivity and data transfer quotas and start designing for real users!

Using an Apple device has never been so frustrating for me like it has been in the past two years.

Re: How Apple Plans to Root Out Bugs, Revamp iPhone Software

#196

Post by untog »

nly wrote: post #88
untog wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So while I hope the do fix long standing small bugs, I think the average user would lose their mind if they do. I really don't think they would. If you asked any person on the street what new features came with iOS 11 vs iOS 10 I really don't think they'd be able to tell you. It was a very minor upgrade, and no-one really seemed to care. A number of people I know try to avoid updating because they mostly associate…

Isn't the answer poop emoji with facial recognition?

I'd say that was more of an iPhone X feature than an iOS 11 one.

Re: How Apple Plans to Root Out Bugs, Revamp iPhone Software

#197

Post by gergles »

whitehouse3 wrote: post #85
gergles wrote: post #84

I just hope they can make Spotlight work. I can drag down from the home menu, type the full name of an app on the phone, and only get random other results (or the App Store link to the app.) e.g.: https://imgur.com/a/jYE9M (reminders is a built-in app but apparently Spotlight's never heard of it)

You can manually select which apps can be found with Spotlight in the settings app. I had the same problem finding 1Password until I went into settings and explicitly added it. This is terrible UX, but that’s how to fix it on your device until Apple sorts it out.

Thank you for this! I had no idea, but about half the apps on my phone were randomly set as "do not show in search". I definitely never had seen these settings before, so am boggled as to why Apple just randomly decided to ship an ineffective search.

Re: How Apple Plans to Root Out Bugs, Revamp iPhone Software

#198

Post by exBarrelSpoiler »

vlovich123 wrote: post #190
cageface wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on your experience there what would you say is the cause of the recent slip in software quality in both iOS and macOS? As an outsider it looks to me like they're just pushing too hard to keep up with a yearly release schedule but that's based on no inside knowledge at all.

It's really hard to put any single root cause on it. Firstly, mobile OSes are massive beasts with lots of different teams working on it. Co-ordinating this becomes very difficult. Additionally, you typically get about 1 build a day which means there's a long lead time to find a bug that's managed to propagate out and then a long lead time for it to get fixed (at least 1 day). I think this decrease in quality has been…

QA being divided between Craig and Kim didn't help, either. Nor the organizational wars.

Re: How Apple Plans to Root Out Bugs, Revamp iPhone Software

#199

Post by bri3d »

chopin wrote: post #148
bri3d wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have existed teams at every company I have ever worked for who argue that this is the Very Best Way (tm) to develop code. It allows for the True Gatekeepers to keep their hold over the perceived software quality and quickly routs any sort of outside interest from modifying the project in any way the True Gatekeepers don't desire. In entirely broken organizations this is an effective way to allow 2-3 good develo…

But how is emailing different from something like eg. Gerrit or pull requests. Ultimately, it's always the maintainers who get to decide what gets into the repo. What you describe is a problem occurring independent of the way changes are merged. I agree that it can be a real problem.

I think your sibling post is similar in sentiment and it comes down to transparency. In the "patches-to-a-list" model, there's no running status page or record of exactly what patches were rejected or ignored, and by whom. Anyone wanting that information would have to go to a lot of work parsing, searching, and analyzing the mailing list.

With Gerrit or pull requests, reviewers are clearly assigned and patch states are managed in a centralized dashboard. This makes it a lot easier for external stakeholders (managers, other development staff, etc.) to gain insight into how a team's working and whether or not they're being accepting or effective. And that's why, to me, these kinds of toxic maintainers seem to suffer an extinction event when moved to a more transparent system. The maintainers are the same, but their tool - quietly rejecting patches with little accountability - is taken away from them.

Re: How Apple Plans to Root Out Bugs, Revamp iPhone Software

#200

Post by exBarrelSpoiler »

abalone wrote: post #193
pdpi wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "Engineer thinks PM is a bozo", it's a post explaining a very concrete, objectively negative behaviour from the PM team. I've worked at companies where that sort of behaviour was rampant, I've worked at places where it wasn't, and the difference in the end product is palpable. Second, even if it's just anecdotal, I have personally been experiencing issues with my tMBP at work that I haven't had with any prev…

> even if it's just anecdotal... there does seem to be some measurable degradation in their Apple's standards as of lately You just characterized anecdotal evidence as "measurable". That's exactly the logical fallacy at work here. Non-anecdotal evidence of Apple's quality standards: The super long iPad upgrade cycle. It's stretched out and impacting Apple's bottom line because >3 year old iPads still work perfect.

Like any large org, quality standards vary from product to product, just as they do from team to team.
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