Re: a breath of fresh air
Re: a breath of fresh air
- Subject: Re: a breath of fresh air
- From: Fritz Anderson <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2012 12:37:19 -0600
On 9 Mar 2012, at 11:02 AM, Alex Zavatone wrote:
> On Mar 8, 2012, at 6:18 PM, Crispin Bennett wrote:
>
>> No. It's a complex *shipping* product. The second adjective is important, and implies at the least that it basically functions. For many people it doesn't.
>
> Couldn't agree more.
>
>>> Xcode works well here.
>
> That's akin to a software project when a QA engineer reports a bug and the developer says "well, it works on my machine".
>
> For shipping products, functionality has to be balanced with predictability, usability, and stability.
...
> Should the product ship with this functionality no where near being fully baked? Expletive NO.
There is a difference between what a development team owes to a bug/usability report, and what is appropriate to a discussion among users. The developers have to give the report attention, and the reporter respect, unless either so abuses the process that nothing can be done for them. (Radar turns out to be a pessimal system for assuring reporters of Apple's attention and respect.)
But that's not the situation among us, where it's not the vendor, but coequal users, who are having a discussion.
Much (not most) of what we've seen in these threads attributes culpable negligence or outright incompetence to the developers, and that just isn't true. It is appropriate for other users to remark that in their experience, Xcode is a serviceable tool for making their livings. Given human nature as to what drives people to speak up, that is probably the experience of most users. It is completely legitimate for those people to share what they know.
That's not to say that some people aren't crippled by serious problems. But it does weigh against the insinuation that the developers are buffoons.
Many of the same people who have been calling for Apple to immediately deliver fixes for showstopper bugs _also_ demand that Apple not deliver them until the bug fixes undergo a lengthier* QA process than is now in place. Which is it?
* (No, probably not "bigger." You can't have the baby in a month by putting nine women on the job. See Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month.")
The Xcode team labors under goals that are in tension with each other. The deliver-fixes-right-now and the QA-till-no-bugs imperatives are two of them. Further, they must deliver versions that support Apple's new products well in advance of those products' release. That's nonnegotiable. The products come out on a schedule that can't be delayed until the supporting Xcode is bug-free. That means Xcode 4.2 and 4.3 came out with lesser quality than they otherwise might; but if you think the current firestorm is bad, imagine what it would be if there had been no Xcode, bug-free or not, that permitted development for iOS 5.
Given those constraints, and that the product is orders of magnitude more complex than that of any participant in this discussion, it is not fair to call the Xcode developers negligent or incompetent. Anybody who used any prerelease of Xcode knows that the public versions showed a huge degree of care and competence in improving the product and killing bugs. There have been regressions (the source-control reversion button worked in 4.0 and not since), but the fixes and added features overwhelm them.
People make their livings with Xcode. They want it not to defeat their efforts to produce good products. It's existentially frustrating. There ought to be fixes. I get it. But nobody's first answer should be that the developers and their management don't care, or aren't trying, or are too dumb to do it.
— F
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