Tells you something about Apple's testing methodology. QA team at Apple must be playing real fast and loose.
Being affected by 3 serious regressions in Lion (all filed as bugs and Apple closed them as duplicates, btw) - I get the feeling that Apple could do better at software engineering. (Alarms on iOS if you are still not convinced :) Just the fact that they release software that allows authentication without correct password means that they lack any kind of automated test case verification even for basic functionality - and this is basic functionality we are talking about, not some obscure thing that happens only when dozen different factors are combined or a thing that only happens once in billion tries.
Say what you will about Microsoft but in my several years of using Windows I rarely had these type of glaring issues even with the awful amount of hardware it supports. It might just be that Microsoft was forced to adopt better Engineering practices due to their situation - lot of complexity, huge impact potential, and lot of money at stake - 50% server market and the Server OS shares a whole lot with consumer version etc.
Not trying to troll - just my thoughts on something that I have always wondered - how Engineering culture varies between different successful software companies and to what effect.
> Say what you will about Microsoft but in my several years of using Windows I rarely had these type of glaring issues even with the awful amount of hardware it supports.
I'm an ex-MS employee. One thing that really impressed me about my team at MS is the depth and quality of testing that was done. Unit tests, integration, fuzz, load, UI, regression, etc. All done in extreme depth, extremely efficiently, and across every supported SKU (and when you consider every possible OS, culture and .NET combinations out there, that's a lot)
I always thought that an interesting thing about Vista was that although it was widely seen as a horrible failure it wasn't actually highly buggy. It had horrible problems with performance and hardware compatibility, but the software itself didn't seem to contain glaring issues - at least if you calibrated your expectations to the perception of its quality by the market and end users.
On the other hand, Apple always nails the user experience - a release like Vista just wouldn't get out the door. But they let other horrendous quality problems through that would and should be caught by better process.
So it sort of illustrates two fairly orthogonal axes of quality and how different companies excel in different directions along those axes.
Tells you something about Apple's testing methodology. QA team at Apple must be playing real fast and loose.
Yep, I agree. I've been very disappointed with Lion, even taking into account the common "Don't buy an x.0 Apple product", there were some terrible bugs (I was personally bitten by the inability to look up DNS servers after waking from sleep, which I can't believe was missed in testing).
Apple's software quality has been markedly going down. iTunes is a UI mess, and I used to really like it. Safari continues to lag behind the competition (no omnibar/awesome bar? Really?), iWork has stagnated. I suspect the reason is that Apple is growing, and the Eye of Jobs is focused entirely on iOS products, so the quality is being diluted in other areas.
I strongly feel like Apple's leadership is looking f, orward to the day when they can kill off the Mac completely. The line of "we'll always need something for developers to develop on" doesn't make a lot of sense. With Apple on x86, I can see a future where Xcode lives on Ubuntu/Windows.
Apple's software quality has been markedly going down
People have said the same thing about nearly every OS X release (with the possible exception of 10.1). At least Lion doesn't erase your firewire hard drives [1], or delete your entire home folder [2] etc etc. The comparative severity of these really bad bugs can be debated, but I think in terms of general quality OS X 10.0 − 10.2 really were quite a lot worse than the more recent releases.
I don't disagree with your general point though, the Mac is obviously not their priority anymore, and hasn't been for a while.
Possible, but having gone from 8.6->Linux->10.4 myself, I think it's worth noting that 10.6, their previous release, was without question one of the most solid, stable, usable desktop OSes ever released by anyone. 10.7's instability and rough edges seem extraordinarily out of place by comparison.
>I strongly feel like Apple's leadership is looking f, orward to the day when they can kill off the Mac completely.
Yeah - it sounds unrealistic for any other company but Apple is not at all shy of ignoring and finally dumping products that don't do great for their bottom line.
Either Xcode on Windows/Linux OR Web IDE - iOS App Development may be offered as a service. You develop on the web and submit code to Apple's server farm where specialized devices compile/deploy/run it and send it to your device to test it - maximum control for Apple. But I think that's a little too sophisticated - so might be a while!
I don't know about Microsoft. Their road to software quality has been long and hard. Do you remember Windows 95? How many new Windows versions did they ship before they got anywhere near the stability and reliability of *nix systems?
They're doing well these days, but it didn't happen overnight.
Also, although I'm not defending anyone, I've never worked on an operating system before but I can imagine QA isn't a walk in the park.
That's exactly my point. They started off not so great and made mistakes on their way but if you look at how they evolved their Engineering practices in response to grave realities - the XP pre-SP2 security nightmare for instance, created a lot of positive Engineering changes at Microsoft and with Windows 7 they have made a lot of tangible progress in that area.
OS QA is a pain - a huge one for Microsoft given the complexity and volumes involved. The pain is in dealing with unknowns and unpredictable combinations of thousands of different variables and what reaction it produces.
But for something like authentication there must be standard testcases that are automatically executed and verified - blank password authentication, wrong password auth should all be standard test cases that are executed automatically and no software should go out the door until those basics are looking good.
Being affected by 3 serious regressions in Lion (all filed as bugs and Apple closed them as duplicates, btw) - I get the feeling that Apple could do better at software engineering. (Alarms on iOS if you are still not convinced :) Just the fact that they release software that allows authentication without correct password means that they lack any kind of automated test case verification even for basic functionality - and this is basic functionality we are talking about, not some obscure thing that happens only when dozen different factors are combined or a thing that only happens once in billion tries.
Say what you will about Microsoft but in my several years of using Windows I rarely had these type of glaring issues even with the awful amount of hardware it supports. It might just be that Microsoft was forced to adopt better Engineering practices due to their situation - lot of complexity, huge impact potential, and lot of money at stake - 50% server market and the Server OS shares a whole lot with consumer version etc.
Not trying to troll - just my thoughts on something that I have always wondered - how Engineering culture varies between different successful software companies and to what effect.