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nradovyesterday at 10:36 PM3 repliesview on HN

I totally understand that from the perspective of individual employees: they have little incentive to do more than the bare minimum to close tickets. But this behavior is typically a symptom of broken corporate culture and failure to align internal metrics. For every customer who takes the trouble to submit a formal bug report there are likely many others who just live with it, and badmouth you to other customers. Doing deep investigations of even minor bug reports also tends to expose other, more serious latent bugs. And root cause analysis allows you to create closed-loop solutions to prevent similar future bugs.

Large monopolistic tech companies like Apple and Microsoft can afford to ignore this stuff for years because there are few realistic alternatives. But longer term eventually a disruptive competitor comes along who takes product quality and customer service more seriously.


Replies

SchemaLoadyesterday at 10:47 PM

There's also going to be mountains of bugs resulting from cosmic rays hitting the computer, defective ram chips, weird modifications of the system the reporter hasn't mentioned.

You could sink an infinite amount of time investigating and find nothing. At some point you have to cut off the time investment when only one person has reported it and no devs have been able to reproduce it.

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godelskitoday at 2:04 AM

  > For every customer who takes the trouble to submit a formal bug report there are likely many others who just live with it
This reminds me of a fairly old but famous story about ignoring bugs from Linux users. I couldn't find the HN post but here's slashdot

  | Though only 5.8% of his game's buyers were playing on Linux, they generated over 38% of the bug reports. Not because the Linux platform was buggier, either. Only 3 of the roughly 400 bug reports submitted by Linux users were platform specific
The short is that they initially ignored it, triaging, but it was a mistake. Especially since the culture of Linux users is to submit more detailed bug reports. That their submissions help general users.

Don't just a bug report by its cover, judge it by its merits. We're all biased to dismiss them and find an excuse to ignore them. But that just leads to bad software.

https://m.slashdot.org/story/391921

galangalalgoltoday at 1:26 AM

Yeah competition works. I don't like nexus that much but they accept every ticket I've opened and fix it the next release. Two things I think affect that. One, my ticket has the name of a fortune 100 next to it. Two, artifactory will eat them alive if they don't keep customers happy.