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Why can’t she report it as a usability bug? Instead she complains loudly to her readership. I guess Fitbit’s next step should be to recruit female testers to a

Why can’t she report it as a usability bug? Instead she complains loudly to her readership. I guess Fitbit’s next step should be to recruit female testers to avoid Twitter mobs.

pgeorgi 8y ago
Maybe she did report it? A report may or may not result in a fix. A post like that might accelerate progress there (given some reach).
danShumway 8y ago
If the company is big enough, complaining loudly to your readership is often the fastest way to report a bug and to get someone who can actually do something to look at it. Take a look at the most recent web audio stuff that happened in Chrome. Bugs had been sitting open in the tracker for months before the code got pushed into stable - dev team didn't do anything about it until prominent developers started calling them out publicly on Twitter and news sites started reporting on it. As a smaller example, I used to do API level maintenance on a software stack. I didn't get to prioritize whatever bugs I wanted - upper management did. I actually advised people who had breaking bugs not to just file something in the tracker, because I couldn't guarantee that I would be able to take time to fix it. On top of filing an issue, I told teams that had serious problems that they should go to a manager and explain that it was going to make them miss a release deadline. Then I'd be allowed to take time off of the more flashy features that looked good in press releases to fix their problem. There is at least a decent chance that somewhere on the Fitbit engineering team, someone is reading that article and saying, "finally we get to address this #?&x$ issue because now it's public enough to care about." > I guess Fitbit’s next step should be to recruit female testers Yeah, they should, because female testers are more likely to catch problems that will effect females. They should also hire blind testers to catch accessibility problems. They should also hire runners and joggers to test if their tracking is accurate in normal usage. I'm not sure if you meant this as a joke, having people who are similar to your end users test your product is basically business 101.

Why can’t she report it as a usability bug? Instead she complains loudly to her readership. I guess Fitbit’s next step should be to recruit female testers to avoid Twitter mobs.

pgeorgi 8y ago

Maybe she did report it? A report may or may not result in a fix. A post like that might accelerate progress there (given some reach).

danShumway 8y ago

If the company is big enough, complaining loudly to your readership is often the fastest way to report a bug and to get someone who can actually do something to look at it. Take a look at the most recent web audio stuff that happened in Chrome. Bugs had been sitting open in the tracker for months before the code got pushed into stable - dev team didn't do anything about it until prominent developers started calling them out publicly on Twitter and news sites started reporting on it. As a smaller example, I used to do API level maintenance on a software stack. I didn't get to prioritize whatever bugs I wanted - upper management did. I actually advised people who had breaking bugs not to just file something in the tracker, because I couldn't guarantee that I would be able to take time to fix it. On top of filing an issue, I told teams that had serious problems that they should go to a manager and explain that it was going to make them miss a release deadline. Then I'd be allowed to take time off of the more flashy features that looked good in press releases to fix their problem. There is at least a decent chance that somewhere on the Fitbit engineering team, someone is reading that article and saying, "finally we get to address this #?&x$ issue because now it's public enough to care about." > I guess Fitbit’s next step should be to recruit female testers Yeah, they should, because female testers are more likely to catch problems that will effect females. They should also hire blind testers to catch accessibility problems. They should also hire runners and joggers to test if their tracking is accurate in normal usage. I'm not sure if you meant this as a joke, having people who are similar to your end users test your product is basically business 101.