I hope something changes with the way apple manages bugs. It’s incredibly demoralizing to spend my time reproducing a bug, writing up the bug report I’d want to receive (including a minimal test case), and hearing nothing for years until it’s either closed or receiving a message asking me to do more work to determine if it’s still an issue.
Are there companies that do this well, at a scale approaching Apple’s?
I can think of lots of reasons why this is a “hard problem”, and how it’d be hard to staff. I also think they’re getting paid to solve this problem, and aren’t.
There's a fundamental problem that the first step is you doing all that work. That means there's no way to tell you the work is wasted; you already did it.
I generally think people should do /less/ work when reporting bugs because of this, but you should be careful and clear about what you do put in there.
Some of that work does benefit me: better understanding of the bug, verification that it’s not something I’m doing wrong, maybe some ideas of a workaround.
I’ve stopped doing the second phase: packaging it up and submitting it to apple, because that’s shown itself to be an entirely negative experience.
If apple’s not going to spend the $$ on internal QA, and they’re not going to spend the $$ on developer relations, I’m not especially interested in donating my time to help them. I know I’ve seen a similar sentiment from other developers for years.
I think low quality / low content bug reports are usually worse than none, because they decrease the signal to noise ratio of bugs. Maybe if there was a better channel of communication, and I knew it’d be more interactive it’d be different.
I got so fed up of all the Apple bugs I sold all my Apple stuff and bought a PC. At least I'm greeted with new and interesting bugs no one is going to close.
Are there companies that do this well, at a scale approaching Apple’s?
I can think of lots of reasons why this is a “hard problem”, and how it’d be hard to staff. I also think they’re getting paid to solve this problem, and aren’t.