Apple has had a great and terrible week. It announced 10 million new iPhones sold during the first weekend they were available, but then got blindsided by a bug in iOS 8.0.1 that killed cellular connections and TouchID for iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus devices. That would seem like something that would come up in testing, and yet, it went out into the wild.
At iMore, Nick Arnott, who also does quality assurance for a mobile development company, explains how this sort of thing happens:
I’ve experienced the gut-wrenching unpleasantness of being part of a team that was responsible for shipping a major bug. For development and QA teams, I can’t think of anything worse than pouring your heart and soul into a project you’re passionate about, working tirelessly night after night to meet impossible deadlines, feeling relieved and euphoric to have finally shipped, only to have the rug pulled out from under you with a horrible bug that somehow got missed. It’s awful. It’s heartbreaking. And even once you’ve pulled a few more days of insane hours remediating the bug, you’re still left unable to stop beating yourself up. You can’t stop thinking “how could I have missed that?” While I don’t know how the issues in 8.0.1 made it out the door, I do know that it wasn’t the result of a lack of intelligence, skill, or care.
(Hat tip to Jason Snell at Six Colors for pointing to the article; if you haven’t seen Jason’s new site and/or subscribed to his newsletter, get on over.)
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