Why the company’s software is struggling (Bugs) – Former Apple developer
Former Apple developer Reveals why Apple’s software’s components are troubling now a days
Apple – The most reputed Electronic company with unique nature and brings new technology to the market. As it is the most popular brand with much more products here comes the trouble from last year. You may have noticed that for the past few months Apple’s software comes under much more dispute. Due to some critical bugs in macOS, the Apple products are launched out of the schedule and that to with most of its features disabled. Though Apple claims everything is fine, You may notice some bugs are still reported by the users. It clearly shows that something is wrong with the Apple Software Development Process.
Though company managed to convince the customers, It also reveals that it will take a year to fix the bugs and to go up for future performance optimization. But it seems that it’s not possible to clear the bugs that soon – by analyzing a post by a Software Engineer of Apple.
The software engineer who worked on iChat and Maps for years, reveals that the problems run deeper than just a lack of focus. According to him attributed Apple’s software problems to a culture, not a lack of focus:
As someone who used to work on iOS at Apple, what that company honestly needs is a culture not beholden to the whims of their EPMs (project managers). They used to help organize and work with engineering to schedule things across the company’s waterfall style development. However, by the time I left, they essentially took power over engineering. Radar became the driver for the entire company and instead of thinking about a holistic product, everything became a priority number. P0 meant, emergency fix immediately, P4 meant nice to have. You get the idea.
Nothing could be worked on if it wasn’t in Radar with a priority number attached and signed off by the teams’ EPM. No room for a side project or time away from your daily duties because there were always P1s to fix. If you didn’t personally have any left for the day, you’d take one from another engineer who was likely swamped with their own list of P1s.
It is clear that Apple’s culture doesn’t sounds that good to create a quality code and atleast as of now Apple should concentrate on it.
P1 P1 P1, everything is always in crises mode. Also why I and everyone around me felt bad for taking any vacation. If we weren’t constantly thinking about fixing those P1s, we were some how letting our team down.
This is how you get bugs in shipping software. EPMs driven to schedule things and over manage engineers would decide on a whim that something was a P2. That was basically always shelved to a follow-up .1 release.
Ultimately, engineers lost the freedom to decide when a feature was ready to ship. So here I see some “leak” about quality and I think, this is just PR spin for a buggy iOS 11. Unless the company is willing to take power away from the all-mighty EPM org, I just don’t see how engineering will really change.
The engineer’s account lines up perfectly with what Apple’s Craig Federighi told software teams recently, according to Bloomberg:
Software chief Craig Federighi laid out the new strategy to his army of engineers last month, according to a person familiar with the discussion. His team will have more time to work on new features and focus on under-the-hood refinements without being tied to a list of new features annually simply so the company can tout a massive year-over-year leap, people familiar with the situation say. The renewed focus on quality is designed to make sure the company can fulfill promises made each summer at the annual developers conference and that new features work reliably and as advertised.
Some of the recent bugs are Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws, Iphone x incoming call display delay problem, ETC.,
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