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Fun fact: Apple's internal bug tracking tool, Radar, traces its origins to a pen-and-paper tracking system from the very early days. In a similar fashion to RA
by jkcorrea 7y ago
Fun fact: Apple's internal bug tracking tool, Radar, traces its origins to a pen-and-paper tracking system from the very early days.
In a similar fashion to RAID from the article, it's use expanded way beyond the original use case and is now used by nearly every team at Apple, from hardware, to test, to marketing, retail, and everything in between.
It's often the butt of a lot of jokes as most people hate its dated and confusing UI :).
edit: Though to be fair, the team maintaining it has made massive strides recently to completely revamp the UX which is no small feat given such a wide range of business critical use cases.
- saagarjha 7y agoAs far as I can tell, most teams think Radar is the best bug tracking tool ever. Externally, it's extremely frustrating to interact with, even more so through Feedback Assistant.
- jkcorrea 7y agoActually you bring up a good point - the reactions are perhaps more bimodal than anything. If you're on one of the teams it was designed for, it is indeed near perfect. If not, it's far from it.
- daniel_reetz 7y agoIt was torture. Bimodal is right.
- lilyball 7y agoThe UI was old and crufty and it was a pain in many ways to work with. But I really miss it because it’s still better than any other issue tracking system I’ve ever used.
- PeterStuer 7y agoCan you elaborate on what made/makes it better?
- ta999999171 7y agoAnother request, what made it great?
- JadeNB 7y ago> As far as I can tell, most teams think Radar is the best bug tracking tool ever. To judge from the outside, one of its features is that it makes it super easy to ignore years-old and highly multiply submitted bugs.
- wlesieutre 7y agoI've heard using it externally described as "throwing a Radar over the wall"
- saagarjha 7y agoI see you've stumbled across P3 - Important.
- fnord123 7y agoThey've probably yet to use Bloomberg's DRQS. It's a dream to use. If I understand correctly, Bloomberg had been migrating to Jira. What a shame.
- why_only_15 7y agoIt even has a cute avatar, Annika the Anteater, that a bunch of people have plushes of
- swrobel 7y agoTried to find a pic... Does Apple secrecy really extend that far?
- rwc 7y agoyou mean the first image to come up in a google image search for [Annika the Anteater apple radar]? https://twitter.com/macshome/status/1028996446903783426 https://twitter.com/macshome/status/1028996446903783426
- AceJohnny2 7y agoHere's an old version: https://images.app.goo.gl/zxbGoJuVHxSd2dhGA https://images.app.goo.gl/zxbGoJuVHxSd2dhGA
- briandear 7y agoMost Apple employees don’t have extensive public social media and those that do are generally pretty careful about posting photos of anything inside buildings. There isn’t specifically any secrecy around radar the plush toy, but most tend to be a lot more private social media-wise than most people.
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- tambourine_man 7y agoThe problem isn’t the bug tracking system, it’s that Apple rarely responds on a timely manner and when it does, it’s often not that useful. The frustration streams from the human side, not the bits
- plorkyeran 7y agoYeah, the new feedback assistant UI was pretty buggy and unpleasant to use for a few months, but it's now perfectly fine and I have no complaints with the tool itself. The problem is that reporting bugs to Apple is a giant waste of time, not that the tool for reporting bugs to them is bad.
- why_only_15 7y agoThe majority of the bugs filed are machine-filed or filed internally. It's also used a lot for project-management type stuff. I don't think radar is really very intended for external stuff, though maybe it should be.