On Oct 29, 2007, at 5:10 PM, David Catmull wrote: On Oct 29, 2007, at 4:28 PM, Chris Hanson <email@hidden> wrote: Don't let a resolution of "duplicate" keep you from filing bugs.
It ought to be just the opposite: it means you're not the only one complaining about the issue, which should be encouraging.
It is, in fact. Many teams (mine included) put a premium on high-dup-count bugs, and the Mac OS X Project Office usually gives recognition and a small prize for the engineer who fixed the bug with higest dup count in a given release.
Dups are also extremely helpful to us in narrowing down bugs that are sensitive to particular configurations or contexts. For example, we have been able to tell if a bug is architecture-specific, sensitive to processor count, or network-related based on noticing the system configuration of the duplicates in ways that we couldn't if we had fewer data points. Perhaps there's something Apple can change to avoid the impression that "duplicate" means "yeah, we know, go away"? Part of the problem is that you can't access the original bug because all bugs are considered private. I wish that were optional.
This is among the things I wish ADC would put in place, though balancing developer confidentiality against defect visibility is a huge issue. Most developers don't want their competitors to be able to see what they're working on by being able to see the data they provide to Apple in bug reports; we get much higher quality bug reports because we maintain the confidentiality of the project and source code information provided.
But note that a discussion of ADC processes and practices is off-topic for the Xcode list. (I wish there were a list that it would be on-topic for, but that's another topic that's off-topic for this list).
Chris |