My personal feelings are that #2 (crash reporting) and #6 (complexity) are the biggest issues facing Apple software quality. Apple is a metrics-driven company, and when managers see bad metrics going down (like crashes), they think they are doing a great job.
But, just like with police crime reporting, there can be an effect where metrics are massaged or are reported differently. With Apple, I think the issue is that crashes are avoided by design or by nature of growing complexity, which means that metrics will continually be going down, even if user-facing issues go up. An example being that a failed sync does not crash.
Apple has attempted to get ahead of this, recently, with the new Feedback Assistant allowing beta users to grab and report sysdiagnoses, but there's still a lot of work to do. I really appreciate the point the article makes:
> Besides the fact that bugs are expensive, both in support costs and engineer time, they’re starting to become a public relations concern.
Apple would be wise to heed this, instead of continuing to blindly trust metrics.
But, just like with police crime reporting, there can be an effect where metrics are massaged or are reported differently. With Apple, I think the issue is that crashes are avoided by design or by nature of growing complexity, which means that metrics will continually be going down, even if user-facing issues go up. An example being that a failed sync does not crash.
Apple has attempted to get ahead of this, recently, with the new Feedback Assistant allowing beta users to grab and report sysdiagnoses, but there's still a lot of work to do. I really appreciate the point the article makes:
> Besides the fact that bugs are expensive, both in support costs and engineer time, they’re starting to become a public relations concern.
Apple would be wise to heed this, instead of continuing to blindly trust metrics.