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The Spotify desktop client had a bug where, every time you pressed "back", it would lose the scroll position on the previous page. It would show you the correct
by stupidcar 10y ago
The Spotify desktop client had a bug where, every time you pressed "back", it would lose the scroll position on the previous page. It would show you the correct point, but when you tried to interact with it, it would jump back to the top of the page. It was incredibly frustrating if you were trying to browse through an artist's albums.
This is the kind of bug that should have been easily caught by automated regression testing. It wasn't. That should have been easily caught by a pre-release QA process. It wasn't. The kind that, if it it sneaked into a release, should have been triggered a rollback or a quick patch. It didn't.
Instead, they left this ugly bug in place for months. Despite dozens of complaints of their support forums, containing hundreds of posts. And throughout, I never saw a single official response from a Spotify employee. The only communication was hearsay through volunteer moderators, who said it was being "worked on", but with no suggestion of why it wasn't being fixed sooner, or when it actually would be.
Spotify push out updates to their client almost every few days, but it's clear their software development process is garbage, and that their developers are either unwilling, or unable to prioritise basic bug fixes. If I had to guess, I'd suggest that it's a combination of technical debt and bad processes inherited from their startup days, combined with a management focus on features that support monetisation goals rather than basic maintenance.
- croon 10y ago> If I had to guess, I'd suggest that it's a combination of technical debt and bad processes inherited from their startup days, combined with a management focus on features that support monetisation goals rather than basic maintenance. I wish it was that. I'm not claiming to know, but AFAIR they've done at least two overhauls which I believe changed both dependencies, interface and logic, which suggests they had at least the opportunity to clean out any technical debt. But for sure, something in the client development is broken. I remember reporting that bug too, as well as others.
- crdoconnor 10y agoIf they did a big bang rewrite in a hurry they likely just swapped one kind of technical debt for another.
- ivraatiems 10y agoEach of their overhauls has been a massive failure. Spotify "1.0" didn't even have ctrl-f support for monthS!
- JimDabell 10y ago> it's clear their software development process is garbage, and that their developers are either unwilling, or unable to prioritise basic bug fixes. In my experience, when things are this bad, the prioritisation is being made outside of the development team. Working with a super buggy codebase is unpleasant, demoralising work. Developers don't do it by choice.
- WickyNilliams 10y agoThis issue has been driving me insane! I never went looking on the forums, assumed that my installation was buggy or something. Just noticed, thanks to this comment, that it's FINALLY been fixed. Excellent
- WickyNilliams 10y agoThis issue has been driving me insane! I never went looking on the forums, assumed that my installation was buggy or something. Just noticed, thanks to this comment, that it's FINALLY been fixed. Excellent