Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Not sure if you're familiar with how iOS/OSX works.

For the Darwin team which is the actual core OS they would have to deal a lot with CPU architectures. But they again they have always dealt with this since back in the NeXT days. ARM and x86 isn't a big deal to manage and there isn't much evidence that something is wrong in that area.

For the UI teams i.e. System Frameworks, Cocoa, WindowServer etc. They are abstracted away from worrying about CPU architectures and they are the ones responsible for all the bugs we are seeing today. You can argue context switching is an issue here but again we don't have much visibility that iOS/OSX engineers are jumping back and forth every day.

So which team might have screwed up here? Is this a UI issue or a backend/system library issue? What about the previous root account unlock issue?

I actually put the blame on Agile.

A few years ago there was a noticeable increase in the frequency of point updates at the expense of quality. In agile, testing either (a) relies heavily on automation or (b) only tests that particular story. In highly complex systems that's often not sufficient and rarely do security teams for example involve themselves on a per story basis.

Personally I think the industry as a whole needs to sit back and realise that Agile wasn't the panacea it was made out to be.

Well, more specifically the issue is that unit-testing alone is not enough. At some point you have to test the entire system as a whole.

I don't think agile practices preclude running regression suites throughout the development cycle.

I am absolutely agree with you. Agile is not silver bullet and people just don't get it. Also many times it is executed very wrongly.

No, a lot of Agile teams do have integration tests and higher level tests

But the TDD cargo-culters and UncleBob fans forget that inconvenient fact and think TDD solves ALL problems

Reply on news.ycombinator.com