The Politics of Bug Reporting

As a contractor, I often have difficulty deciding whether I should report a bug.

First, it costs my client time. Time usually equals client money, but I’m a patsy and usually stop the client’s clock when narrowing down the flaw, building a example the reproduces the issue and and writing up the report. It’s common that I’ll spend a day writing up a bug. (This is way Apple’s policy of every-developer-fully-writing-up-each-bug is irksome and counterproductive. Finding your day-effort results in a mere “Duplicate” response is… unsatisfying).

But that’s the tip of the iceberg. Next is the work-around. Figure out exactly what the problem is, and figure out how to mitigate it. More time spent. This time the clock is running.

And there’s the rub. Ideally the work-around would be published, both privately to Apple and publicly for other developers to use. However, my client has sunk cash in developing that work-around. Often a work-around can even be viewed as a competitive advantage. I push to publish what I can, yet I bite my tongue when it’s obviously not in the cards.

Even beyond that, there’s a disadvantage to alerting Apple to the bug in the first place: they might fix it. That reads wacky, but follow along.

With my work-around, my client has a solution. If Apple doesn’t know about the bug in the first place, end of story. Happily ever after.

Now what happens if we report the bug and Apple actually fixes it?

In the best case, my work-around is harmless. Whew, also end of story. Everybody wins.

Worst case — sadly, the common case — is my work-around itself breaks. Now the client is paying twice: the initial work-around development and the post-fix work-around fix-up. Ironically, a post-fix work-around is usually more complicated than pre-fix, since you need logic to determine whether the fix is in place before conditionally applying the work-around.

So whether to report a bug is a surprisingly complicated story, at least for contractors. I wish it weren’t.

Monday, December 04, 2006
03:32 AM