[gortok]

I was literally just coming in here to comment "in before someone says this is fine and there's no issue." and the first(!) comment is effectively "this is fine and there's no issue."

The sentiment feels like software folks are optimizing for the local optimum.

It's the programmer equivalent of "if it's important they'll call back." while completely ignoring the real world first and second-order effects of such a policy.

[torben-friis]

I've seen this in many teams and it always drives me nuts: "hey this ticket is old and we didn't bother, let's delete it to keep the board clean".

You feeling accomplished by seeing an empty list is not the goal!

[integralid]

Feeling overwhelmed by insurmountable mountain of bugs and issues is not the way either. We can argue that closing the tickets is not the best way, but if realistically nobody will ever look at them, why not make the developers feel better.

[torben-friis]

Either you truly need to fix the bugs, in which case the feeling is good and maybe more effort should go that way (more resources assigned to it or whatever), or you're at a scale where tackling everything is impossible and you shouldn't feel overwhelmed by seeing the noise then.

But I think modern industry pretends all it's fine to convince themselves that it's ok to chase the next feature instead.

[NetMageSCW]

Because it isn’t about the developers feelings, it’s about the users. Why not set aside a day or half day a week to fix those bugs instead?

[lxgr]

Move them to a deficated status. “Never triaged”, “lost”, “won’t do”, what have you.

That way, you’re at least not deluding yourself about your own capacity to triage and fix problems, and can hopefully search for and reopen issues that are resurfaced.

[groundzeros2015]

Deficated?

[jerhewet]

I like this. It should be a status.

"I deficated this issue. Closed."

[lxgr]

This was supposed to be "dedicated", but I might also be coming around :)

[brigade]

It’s really a question of whether a team believes bugs are defects that deserve to be fixed, or annoyances that get in the way of shipping features. And all too often, KPIs and promotions are tied to the features, not the bugs.

Plus, I’ve been in jobs where fixing bugs ends up being implicitly discouraged; if you fix a bug then it invites questions from above for why the bug existed, whether the fix could cause another bug, how another regression will be prevented and so on. But simply ignoring bug reports never triggered attention.

[fweimer]

Is it really programmers doing this, though?

These auto-closing policies usually originate from somewhere else.

[jlarocco]

Considering Apple is one of the largest companies in the world, raking in money, what consequential effects are you talking about? It certainly doesn't seem to hurt their bottom line, which is the only thing they care about.

As a software developer, I don't have any problem with this. If a bug doesn't bother somebody enough for them to follow up, then spend time fixing bugs for people who will. Apple isn't obligated to fix anybody's bug.

It's not like they were nagging him about it - it's been years, and they had major releases in the mean time. Quite possible it was fixed as a side effect of something else.

[gortok]

> It certainly doesn't seem to hurt their bottom line, which is the only thing they care about.

I want to draw out this comment because it's so antithetical to what Apple marketed that it stood for (if you remember, the wonderful 1984 commercial Apple created; which was very much against the big behemoths of the day and the way they operated).

We're at the point where we've normalized crappy behavior and crappy software so long as the bottom line keeps moving up and to the right on the graph.

Not, "Let's build great software that people love.", but "How much profit can we squeeze out? Let's try to squeeze some more."

We've optimized for profit instead of happiness and customer satisfaction. That's why it feels like quality in general is getting worse, profit became the end goal, not the by-product of a customer-centric focus. We've numbed ourselves to the pain and discomfort we endure and cause every single day in the name of profit.

[jlarocco]

> We've optimized for profit instead of happiness and customer satisfaction.

It's easy to blame the companies, but if the consumers keep buying the shitty products then there's no reason for the companies to spend money fixing stuff. I stopped using Apple long ago because I thought the software quality was going to crap. A lot of people won't do that, and so they get what Apple gives them.

Still, as a software engineer, I don't see a problem closing out old, abandoned bugs. Even for a company of Apple's size, there's limited time and sometimes it can be literally impossible to fix all of the bugs in a way that satisfies the people opening them. Given that, their approach for deciding which bugs to close seems reasonable and more fair then other ways of doing it.

[eszed]

This is exactly the mindset to which GP and I object.

[Noaidi]

> It certainly doesn't seem to hurt their bottom line

…yet

[Barbing]

>anybody's bug.

:)

Funny at first but I’m coming around to that perspective

[devmor]

If you are looking at it from a business perspective, there is little value to fixing a bug that is not impacting your revenue.

Of course, the developers should be determining if the bug may have a greater impact that will or does cause a problem that impacts revenue before closing it - not doing that is negligent.

[detourdog]

I have been on the other side where I can't replicate/verfiy and the think the user would tell me if it was fixed. After exhausting myself and contacting the user only to find out it was resolved.

[PunchyHamster]

I mean it can be useful to do that every year on old (say 2y+ tickets) but the way it is usually done is completely aisine

Sensible way would be probably something like this

* run cleaning yearly, on bugs say not touched (which is different than age!) for last 2 years * mark bug waiting for answer, add automated comment with "is it still happening/can you reproduce it on newest version?" * if that gets unanswered for say 3 months THEN close it.

that way at least it's "real" issue and even if solution is not being worked on maybe someone will see workaround that sometimes someone posts in the comment. Not create new one that gets closed for being duplicate...

Meanwhile I've seen shit as aisine as making bug stale 30 days after reporting.