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Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

lapcatsoftware.com

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Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#81

Post by thrtythreeforty »

bloodyplonker22 wrote: post #71
freediddy wrote: post #23

Author must not have worked in enterprise software before. That's a classic trick where the developer will push back on the bug author and say "I can't reproduce this, can you verify it with the latest version?" without actually doing anything. And if it doesn't get confirmed then they can close it as User Error or Not Reproducible. Of course, the only way to counter this is by saying "Yes I verified it" without actu…

If you are a veteran of software in a big company, we all know there will be weekly or bi-weekly meetings that some PM will set up. All the PM will do is go over the JIRA tickets and be like "is this still happening". Default answer is "no", as in "I didn't even try to reproduce it, do you think I have time to even do it?". Default answer by spineless QA person is also "didn't try it again yet". Then, the PM closes t…

Ooh this gives me an interesting passive-aggressive idea to counter pointless "is this still relevant" questions. "No, I haven't hit this in the last 2 days." "No, I haven't hit this since I gave up trying to do it with your tool." And so forth.

The less passive-aggressive version is to use this obviously-unhelpful answer of the obviously-unhelpful question, to actually have a conversation to get the PM to recognize that the default state of a ticket is in fact "no change." Ultimately that may turn into a stale bot if the PM realizes the policy they actually want is some sort of timeout, but at least it's not a time consuming meeting!

(Note, a cathartic thought experiment, but not really good manners to actually do!)

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#82

Post by Ensorceled »

I love that when I search for an odd behaviour or bug in macos or iOS, most of the time I will find a years old bug report with some irrelevant or useless "work around".

This is not too unusual. I've completely given up on bug reports, it's almost always a complete waste of my time.

I'm currently going around in circles with a serious performance issue with two different vendors. They want logs, process lists and now real time data. It's an issue multiple people have complained about in their forums and on reddit. The fact that this exact same thing is going on with TWO different companies ...

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#83

Post by sigbottle »

thewebguyd wrote: post #74
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #52

> perhaps praying that the bug had magically disappeared on its own, with no effort from Apple. I suspect that this is a common approach. It maybe even works, often enough, to make it standard practice. For myself, I've stopped submitting bug reports. It's not the being ignored, that bothers me; it's when they pay attention, they basically insist that I become an unpaid systems engineering QC person, and go through e…

> they basically insist that I become an unpaid systems engineering QC person Microsoft support is guilty of this, especially for Azure & 365 issues. Like sorry, but you aren't paying me to debug your software. Here's a report, and here's proof of me reproducing the problem & some logs. That's all I'm going to provide. It's your software, you debug it.

Damn. I've put quite a lot of effort into open source tools w.r.t. debugging and bugfixing, but yeah putting that for a corporate product that doesn't even respect you must be draining.

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#85

Post by bmitc »

freediddy wrote: post #23

Author must not have worked in enterprise software before. That's a classic trick where the developer will push back on the bug author and say "I can't reproduce this, can you verify it with the latest version?" without actually doing anything. And if it doesn't get confirmed then they can close it as User Error or Not Reproducible. Of course, the only way to counter this is by saying "Yes I verified it" without actu…

I also hate this pressure of it being on the user to come up with a minimal reproducing example. That means that any bug of any moderate complexity will never get fixed because you can't always reduce them to a few steps and they may be statistical.

A bug is a bug, no matter the developers' opinion or the complexity of the bug.

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#86

Post by jerhewet »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #79
lxgr wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Move them to a deficated status. “Never triaged”, “lost”, “won’t do”, what have you. That way, you’re at least not deluding yourself about your own capacity to triage and fix problems, and can hopefully search for and reopen issues that are resurfaced.

Deficated?

I like this. It should be a status.

"I deficated this issue. Closed."

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#87

Post by bmitc »

masklinn wrote: post #61
freediddy wrote: post #23

Author must not have worked in enterprise software before. That's a classic trick where the developer will push back on the bug author and say "I can't reproduce this, can you verify it with the latest version?" without actually doing anything. And if it doesn't get confirmed then they can close it as User Error or Not Reproducible. Of course, the only way to counter this is by saying "Yes I verified it" without actu…

> Author must not have worked in enterprise software before. Or with open source projects. Fucking stalebot.

Take a look at Anthropic's repo. They auto-close issues after just a few weeks.

I don't think I've seen an issue of theirs that wasn't auto-closed.

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#88

Post by lapcat »

freediddy wrote: post #23

Author must not have worked in enterprise software before. That's a classic trick where the developer will push back on the bug author and say "I can't reproduce this, can you verify it with the latest version?" without actually doing anything. And if it doesn't get confirmed then they can close it as User Error or Not Reproducible. Of course, the only way to counter this is by saying "Yes I verified it" without actu…

> Of course, the only way to counter this is by saying "Yes I verified it" without actually verifying it.

I'm not going to lie. That's not who I am. If Apple really wants to close a bug report when the bug isn't fixed, that's on their conscience, if they have one.

Re: Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed

#89

Post by falcor84 »

beembeem wrote: post #78
freediddy wrote: post #23

Author must not have worked in enterprise software before. That's a classic trick where the developer will push back on the bug author and say "I can't reproduce this, can you verify it with the latest version?" without actually doing anything. And if it doesn't get confirmed then they can close it as User Error or Not Reproducible. Of course, the only way to counter this is by saying "Yes I verified it" without actu…

Yep. On the other side of the curtain this often isn't nefarious. It's a simple cost/benefit analysis of spending time on something that one user is complaining about versus a backlog of higher business priorities. I've seen this in my work and it makes me sad for the user, but it often does take a bit of effort to spear these bug reports through.

It's a false dichotomy - something being "a simple cost/benefit analysis" doesn't remove the ethical dimension, and can absolutely be nefarious. A movie villain saying "it was just business" doesn't make their actions less villainous.
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