by Jason Snell
Sympathy for the tester
In his other life, Nick Arnott of iMore runs the quality assurance department for a mobile development company. These are the people who use, test, and break software in order to stamp out bugs. As someone who’s been on a few private betas with him, I’ve seen Nick in action and he’s really good at it.
This all gives Nick a unique perspective on Apple’s recent woes:
For development and QA teams, I can’t think of anything worse than pouring your heart and soul into a project you’re passionate about, working tirelessly night after night to meet impossible deadlines, feeling relieved and euphoric to have finally shipped, only to have the rug pulled out from under you with a horrible bug that somehow got missed. It’s awful. It’s heartbreaking. And even once you’ve pulled a few more days of insane hours remediating the bug, you’re still left unable to stop beating yourself up. You can’t stop thinking “how could I have missed that?”