{"id":30333,"date":"2020-10-02T15:54:14","date_gmt":"2020-10-02T19:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=30333"},"modified":"2020-10-02T15:59:17","modified_gmt":"2020-10-02T19:59:17","slug":"quality-management-in-apples-system-updates-over-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/02\/quality-management-in-apples-system-updates-over-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Quality Management in Apple’s System Updates Over Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Howard Oakley<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Surely the most important way to improve quality is to strengthen quality management processes throughout engineering – the principle of building it right first time, rather than expending more effort at detecting and remediating errors. Simply extending the cycle without changing quality management would be very unlikely to result in any improvement. But better quality management doesn’t entail making the cycle any longer, so cycle length is unlikely to be relevant, as was shown by Apple’s only real two-year development cycle with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

This is right if you’re talking about the quality of next the major release when it first ships. But that’s far less important to customers than the quality at the middle and end of the release. Snow Leopard was not an unusually stable release at 10.6.0, but by 10.6.8 it was legendary, and you could keep using that version until you were happy with the state of 10.7.x. Some customers even skipped 10.7 entirely.<\/p>\n\n

With the yearly release cycle, major versions no longer attain that level of refinement because development stops as Apple moves on to the next reelease. And developers are forced to upgrade earlier because taking advantage of the latest SDK requires the new version of Xcode, which requires a current version of macOS. You can now choose between the still buggy macOS 10.15.7 and the soon-to-be macOS 11.0.0, which will have issues out of the gate, as all releases do. Those are not great choices.<\/p>\n\n

Nick Heer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

For the first few public releases of Mac OS X, Apple stuck to a development cycle of well under a year per release. Beginning with the Panther release in 2003, Mac OS X settled into something closer to an eighteen-month gap between x<\/em>.0 public releases, with a long exception for Tiger. Then, with Mountain Lion in 2012, Apple stated that its intention was to begin releasing a new version of OS X every year<\/a>; Mountain Lion had a shorter cycle than its predecessors, but it was still longer than any release after.<\/p>\n

In all three eras of MacOS development cycles, you will find versions that are legendary for their refinement, and those which are the complete opposite.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Which recent releases are those? macOS 10.14.6 is better than any 10.15, but it retains it share of issues. macOS 10.13.6 has a common Mail IMAP syncing crash that was never fixed. macOS 10.12 was generally a rough release and retained serious PDF bugs throughout its life. My recollection is that macOS 10.11.6 was probably the best since 10.6.8.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n