Re: [OT] Bug Reporter Questions
Re: [OT] Bug Reporter Questions
- Subject: Re: [OT] Bug Reporter Questions
- From: Scott Thompson <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 22:55:44 -0500
On Apr 16, 2004, at 10:23 PM, Allan Odgaard wrote:
Most of this is off topic and just to settle my curiosity, sorry! But
this was the only forum which I could think of, and probably others
may find potential answers interesting :)
I have on two occasions experienced that I wanted to check the status
of a reported bug, only to find that it was simply missing from the
Bug Reporter. Did anyone experience similar? Is the database perhaps
cleaned once in a while (removing closed bugs), or am I just getting
old (remembering reporting bugs that I didn't ;) ).
More likely than not, what happened is that the bug was assigned
internally to a "module" that you don't have permission to see. I've
had that happen.
Is it possible to view bugs other than those I reported myself? e.g.
sometimes I see bug IDs quoted, but is there a place I can actually
look at the description for that bug? And is it perhaps even possible
to do plain-text searches in the database?
No. Apple keeps it's database pretty closed up.
Does anyone know how priorities are assigned to bugs? I often see
people asking others to report some missing/wrong functionality, even
though there already is one, but with the argument that: "maybe that
will give it higher priority". Is that really so? Is the "severity"
of the bug perhaps used? Generally I report most as "Serious Bug / No
workaround" even when the bug actually does "Crash or Data loss", but
normally it has the workaround of simply not using the functionality
or similar, so "Data loss" sounds to strong to me.
There are folks whose job it is to examine the bug reports and assign
them to engineers. The engineering teams work decide on the priority
of the bugs. Some times someone will discover a new aspect of the way
that the system is broken that will make the bug, perhaps, a bit more
onerous. You know... "If I hit the bug through this path it's perhaps
bad but few people will discover it. Going through this other path, I
hit the same bug but everyone will run into it".
Does anyone have any circa figures about how many bugs gets reported?
A lot.
And finally, who runs email@hidden? Is this in-house? and what
expertise does the employees have?
email@hidden is not really a single individual. There are a
number of developer relations specialists who e-mail on the
email@hidden e-mail address (that's why including the followup
number in a reply to devbugs is so important).
The folks that you talk to range from some programming experience to
full engineers. The important point is, however that even though the
person you are talking to may not be an engineer... they can talk to
the engineers.
I have on two occasions been called by someone who I think was from
devbugs (at least it was in relation to reported bugs), and these
persons were just relaying information from engineering, and did not
understand "programming" as one of them expressed it -- so not to
offend anybody, but if these are the same as those making judgments
about which of the thousand daily reported bugs should be passed on to
engineering, I start to understand the bad reputation the Bug Reporter
has ;)
They are not the same folks that escalate the issues to engineering
except in very specialized cases.
Of course if you have a bug for which you need direct engineering
support you can always submit a dts incident. If the problem turns
out to be Apple's bug you can get credit for the incident.
Mange Hilsen,
Scott
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