this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 48 points 7 months ago (9 children)

It seems like I'm constantly finding bugs in businesses' apps. Do they not have people test them?

[–] [email protected] 63 points 7 months ago (3 children)

They do, and they have a backlog of hundreds of issues to fix and they must prioritise then. If fixing a bug doesn't make money, it's not priority.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago

I deal with this every day. It hurts me to my core.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I hate how they'll spend 4 years squashing all the bugs.........and then they cancel the software, and release a new buggy version.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

i will never forgive the emby team for creating the single most idiotic (although rather funny) transcoding system.

It has a resolution selection, along with a bitrate selection, so you would think it forces transcoding.

It turns out the resolution is actually just a suggestion, and the bitrate is what it targets, if it doesn't meet the bitrate, it will transcode, and if you get lucky, it might transcode to the specified resolution.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I am steadfast that I will occasionally take some time and kill off some low hanging fruit. For me, its kind of like a break and lets me clear my head on the bigger issues.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Even then, there are bugs that need multiple people (design, engineering, content, QA, etc) and are not something that can be fixed on a whim.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Those would not be considered low hanging fruit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The problem is that what users consider low hanging fruit is often not, and what is low hanging fruit for devs, is invisible stuff that users don't notice. The intersection is the tastiest low hanging fruit, but as such it's also rare and easily picked by anyone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I never said that users were involved in this. This is just grabbing some bugs off the queue that are simple to fix but have been deprioritized by project manager.

But they do make the customer happy because they are the one that submitted the bug.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 7 months ago

sure they do, you're one of them

[–] [email protected] 36 points 7 months ago (1 children)

As someone in the dev team for a "business app", we probably know about most or all of them, but they're just not important enough for anyone in management to prioritize them as part of a sprint. It's also possible no one has given us reproducible steps to make them happen, so we just straight up don't know what to fix. Usually the former though.

[–] Socsa 3 points 7 months ago

The struggle is real. "We could spend an entire sprint chasing down debt which impacts 10% of users, or we could add another feature which will generate 10% additional revenue."

Management will always choose number 2. Code maintenance is like dead money until something really breaks. The best you can do is quietly have engineers fix low hanging fruit as part of feature sprints, but that requires engineers who give enough fucks to do some extra work.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago (1 children)

they test them...

Whether they do anything with that testing is another story,.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

We are supposed to be testing them? /s

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

you already are smh, you just don't know it!

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I would fix that bug but the complete rewrite that management has had me working on for the past two years will make it obsolete anyway.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Ah, the circle of life

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

Yes, they're called "customers".

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Sometimes. Other times they layoff the QAs and anyone else whose job is about quality.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

They usually do yes however it's all about prioritization.

You may have hundreds or thousands or open requests and issues.

With tens of thousands of closed issues that were either not reproducible, not actually problems, or largely indecipherable.

There's usually a feature roadmap which is where most of the development money and time is spent. If it's an older business application then certain bugs might easily take weeks to find, fix, test, validate, go through user acceptance, A/B test, and then deploy. But fixing is expensive work, so if the bug isn't severe it's usually deprioritized next to higher priority work.