Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

> You are writing this based on gut feeling, big companies simply can't go over every bug report- it's not scalable.

I often hear this repeated, and I keep wondering: why? Why is it not scalable?

Apple had 265 billion dollars of revenue in 2018. I'm spending 10% of my budget on QA. So, in the case of Apple, if you had a 26 billion dollar budget (give or take a few billion) for your QA department, why couldn't you go over every bug report?

It's definitely possible, it's just that companies are making a different tradeoff, assuming that bugs will not influence buying decisions that much. And to a certain extent they are right.

View on HN

Because software is just not something you can just throw more money and people at and expect it to get better. In fact, that is the surest way to make a piece of software worse.

Software, despite all the attempts to come up with ways to commoditize its production, does not scale.

But we are talking about reading bug reports, not writing software. Also, I would argue that finding and fixing bugs actually does scale, as opposed to designing and writing new systems.

You need the small subset of people who actually understand how the software works to fix the bugs, lest you just end up playing whack-a-mole and introducing new bugs.

Ideally, it wouldn't be like this, but we don't live in an ideal world, and there's always some unintended consquence when you start pulling the string on anything nontrivial. And there's never sufficient automated testing, especially for the things that haven't been a problem yet.

Fixing the bugs is one thing, but identifying that user reported bugs are in fact bugs is an entirely separate issue. The latter takes a ton of time, requires no developers, and is what everyone above you in this thread is talking about.

The GP comment that spawned this thread said this:

> If Apple also spent 10% of its revenue on processing bug reports and fixing bugs,

"fixing bugs."

So, fixing bugs is 100% part of the discussion here.

But, let's ignore that for a second.

Let's say Apple triages all its bugs, but then doesn't fix them.

How is that an improvement? How is triaging the bugs but not fixing them at all an improvement?

How do you recognize 100,000 reports of the same bug but different manifestation ? What if it's an architectural issue (and many bugs are)? What if you are already working on a total re-write that's going to be released in 2 releases ? What do you do with bugs found internally ?

Also remember that many bugs requires much more then changing a couple of lines of code, they require cross module changes and re-testing which can lead to more bugs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com