[jonhohle]

What is Apple’s QA process? Do they rely on some random set of manual tests that may or may not get run each release? There have been so many things that seem like one of the most valuable companies in the world would include in tests, but yet break or remain broken.

As an experiment, open Console and filter just errors and faults. Dozens to hundreds of “errors” will scroll by representing the normal operation of the system. (Either they’re not really errors and no one cares or they really are errors and Apple just leaves their systems broken). How can anyone think this is OK?

I haven’t upgraded to Tahoe. I have been a Mac power user for over 20 years, and it becomes less interesting every release. I came for Unix, the script ability, and 3ᴿᴰ party applications. Unix is an afterthought, script ability is all gated behind security gates, and modern apps seem like such a huge regression.

[heavyset_go]

> What is Apple’s QA process?

"Does this increase iCloud subscriptions or not?"

[downrightmike]

Ding ding ding we have a winner!

[senderista]

A colleague joined the team for one of the most visible features in MacOS a few years ago and told me they had no automated testing.

[danpalmer]

Two things are almost always true about Apple:

1) Every team does something different because none of them talk to each other. There are very few horizontal programs across engineering there. As a result, processes and results vary greatly.

2) They're very "traditional" in many ways. They're not a fast moving engineering led company, they're a slow moving business and marketing led company. Engineering is not their secret sauce (except perhaps some bits of hardware engineering). They are sometimes the sort of org that says why both with automated tests when we have a QA team.

[m463]

I think they mostly test in an all-apple environment.

With third party stuff, maybe you'll get lucky, but no guarantees...

3rd party monitors, or keyboards, or mice (what's a mouse?) or ...SMB devices

[alsetmusic]

They didn’t have qa for MacOS when I might have known someone who could speak on that. Was a shocker then, but no surprise now.

[runjake]

Most macOS teams have unit testing. The quality of which varies greatly.