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hector_vasquezyesterday at 8:28 PM3 repliesview on HN

Former Apple employee here. This is a deeper quirk of Apple culture than one would guess.

Each and every Radar (Apple's internal issue tracker is called Radar, and each issue is called a Radar) follows a state machine, going from the untriaged state to the done state. One hard-coded state in this is Verify. Each and every bug, once Fixed, cannot move to Closed without passing through the Verify state. It seems like a cool idea on the surface. It means that Apple assumes and demands that everything must be verified as fixed (or feature complete) by someone. Quite the corporate value to hold the line on, and it goes back decades.

I seriously hated the Verify state. It caused many pathologies. Imagine trying to run a burndown of your sprint when zero of the Radars are closed, because they have to be verified in production before being closed, meaning you cannot verify until after the release. Another pathology is that lots (thousands and thousands) of Radars end up stranded in Verify. Many, many engineers finish their fix, check it in, it gets released and then they move on. This led to a pathology that the writer of this post got caught up in: There is lots of "org health" reporting that goes out showing how many Radars are unverified and how long your Radars stay in the unverified state on average. A lot of teams simply close Radars that remain unverified for some amount of time because they are being "graded" on this.


Replies

jlduggeryesterday at 9:36 PM

> Imagine trying to run a burndown of your sprint when zero of the Radars are closed, because they have to be verified in production before being closed, meaning you cannot verify until after the release.

I think most teams use verify as a "closed" state to hide all that messiness. But sure, zero bugs is a project management fiction and produces perverse outcomes.

zer00eyzyesterday at 8:39 PM

Interesting insight to what should be a good internal process if users followed up.

In this case the bug wasn't fixed.

> A lot of teams simply close Radars that remain unverified for some amount of time because they are being "graded" on this.

The simple solution here: you should also be graded on closing bugs that get re-opened.

lapcatyesterday at 8:34 PM

I think you're incorrectly assuming two things:

1. Apple engineers actually attempted to fix the bug.

2. Feedback Assistant "Please verify with the latest beta" matches the Radar "Verify" state.

I don't believe either of those are true.