Quality Assurance at Apple

For this week’s blog for quality assurance and testing, I decided to read an article from Wired Magazine that focused less on the testing process itself and more of how a company can benefit from it. The article I chose is a little less than a year old about Apple’s securities and vulnerabilities. The article confirms some of what I had hoped — that Apple still has a strong reputation for security. However, some vulnerabilities have damaged how the company is perceived by many. 

In High Sierra, all that you had to do to gain root access was type the word “root.” They fixed it impressively quickly. However, the article wonders if the security flaws like this are emblematic of deeper problems. There have been many more bugs and vulnerabilities found, such as wonky autocorrect on the iPhone. Although not every bug (like the autocorrect) is not always a security issue, it is incredibly irritating. 

One advantage that Apple has over its competitors is that most of its customers update as soon as there is an update. The advantage of this is that people will not be vulnerable using a software without the security fixes in the update. However, Apple might lose this edge if people are wary of updating if it seems like there are always too many bugs in every update.

One of the big problems these days is that it seems that everything seems rushed out. There is a big focus on new features, and not as much focus on fixing the bugs on the features that already exist. The article talked about a 2009 release of “Snow Leopard” which built on the previous release “Leopard.” It heavily focused on getting bugs fixed.

Another issue about perceptions is that even if the mistakes are fixed quite promptly, they are still remembered, with what is described as a pile-on effect. That is, a fixed security flaw won’t be “erased” from a customer’s mind.

The takeaway from all of this is how important quality assurance is to any product. It perhaps is more important than new features. If the old and new features are continuously full of bugs, it is hard for a customer to trust that company anymore. It is better to have solid core software than one with a million extra bells and whistles if it means there’s just as many bugs. Unfortunately, the article concluded that it seems like Apple is leaning towards the latter.

https://www.wired.com/story/apples-security-macos-high-sierra-ios-11/