The Apple press release from last June includes:

… Rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X, set a new standard for quality and lay the foundation for future OS X innovation. …

“We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system.”

Although QA people love this attention to what we are passionate about, conventional wisdom in the software world is that a major release with few new features is suicide, but there are factors working in Apple’s favor.

I don’t find the current version (no snow) Leopard v10.5 to be unstable or buggy, but I know other people have problems with it. There are a lot of user interface (UI) inconsistencies in Leopard among the various Apple applications. I’m interested to see if Snow Leopard sports a more consistent and usable experience.

Apple is selling this upgrade for only $29 US, when their major releases normally sell for $129 US. At $29 Apple customers won’t be looking for much to think they have got a good deal.

Apple’s main competitor Microsoft has created this opportunity. Microsoft Windows costs close to $300. And although Mac OS X only runs on Apple hardware, people’s frustration with Vista’s bugginess and instability has led people to specifically look for a computing experience that address this.

People are hopeful for Windows 7, but it won’t be available until at least a month after Snow Leopard ships. We can expect Windows 7 to have a lot of customer untested technology compared to Mac OS X which looks to be is a very incremental release.

Performance (and polish) is a feature. “Ultimately that feeling of control translates to happiness in everyone. In order to increase the happiness in the world, we all have to keep working on this. Ultimately that feeling of control translates to happiness in everyone. In order to increase the happiness in the world, we all have to keep working on this.”, my boss Matt Mullenweg, Velocity 09 Conference Presentation.

Because Apple builds both the software and the hardware, they can release their next generation of computers to immediately take advantage of the upgraded 64-bit stack, OpenCL for graphic card processing, and GCD multi-core processing throughout Mac OS X.

If Snow Leopard is well executed and well received, it will help people be more confident on computers and expect more from their software. It will be a good day for QA geeks.

How many times has someone said to you, “I’ve never seen that before?”

It happens to me quite a bit.

Case in point: I tried to have a wire sent to my TD Canada Trust line of credit account and it literally was lost in their system for a week. Every phone call with them ended with, “The problem is on the senders end, not ours.” Finally, I walked into a branch and wouldn’t leave until they found my money and got it into my account.

I bend the rules a little bit by basically using this account as a no fees chequing account with a healthy overdraft projection limit

Wire transfers is the only part of my account that was broken.

Anyway, regardless of how I use the account, more recently I wanted to have another wire sent to that account and didn’t want to encounter the same problem. An hour in a branch later and they figure out somehow my line of credit, set up in the year 2000, had been created using an internal branch number that is actually a call center. So there is no one there to process wire transfers.

The only option in the end was to close the account and open a new one. Another day, another hour spent with Julia at the branch and we have a new account number, our automatic transactions are set back up and new cheques are ordered. I imagine the very helpful Financial Services Representative spent many more hours getting a new line of credit approved with the same interest rate modifier.

This is an example of how I have a knack of testing the edges of a system. I previously wrote about my experience with TurboTax. I have many examples like this.

“Person has [environment] A. There is a problem X. Trying to troubleshoot X will be difficult until I can start to change the situation to see what happens to the problem.”

Writes WordPress Support Maven Mark in Please try Firefox . Not only is he the best support person, I have ever worked with, he is an excellent at ad-hoc testing and problem isolation — no surprise, these contribute to his maven status.

“Find, confirm, and fix bugs, then submit and test patches for those bugs.”
From WordPress Bug Hunts

Ryan has done an amazing job running a bug hunt almost every month since I started with WordPress full-time in September.

This past week there were two WordPress bug hunt. One, our usual monthly hunt, starting Tuesday night (here) and ran until 17:00 PST Wednesday, and the second, a weekend edition, starting Friday night and ran through Saturday — I did not particulate in the weekend edition because I was being mortgaged, but the IRC log and the bug activity show it was also a great success.

Holding these two events reflects the amount of participation in the WordPress development. WordPress 2.2 (schedule: April 23rd) is already looking awesome — I run it here (I am still really looking forward to tagging being added).

Confirming that you see the same problem as a reported bug, itself is a huge, valuable contribution! If more people did this one task, WordPress quality would be positively affected. Being able to reproduce a bug, is the first step to being able to fix it.

There were some first time participants during these hunts: 30rg3x, charleshooper, d32, datdesignguy, Dan Coulter, and schnibble.

“The best part is that some new contributors came in and really kicked ass”

Robin Adrianse continued demonstrating himself as a top contributor to WordPress. He was joined by equally influential contributor Jeremy Visser.

John Blackbourn (johnbillion) has continued to put to rest old and new bug reports.

Jennifer Hodgdon who recently started very impressive work in the developer sections of the WordPress Codex is now also making her presence felt strongly in WordPress’ bug tracker.

Jennifer, Jeremy, John, and Robin particularly continue to show themselves to be WordPress superstars, and have a special place in my thoughts with some of the greater WordPress bug hunters like Bas Bosman (nazgul), Nikolay Bachiyski, Rob Miller, Roy Schestowitz, Sewar, Scott Merrill (skippy), Viper007Bond, and so many others!

Mark Jaquith helped Ryan with patch review and committing, and also worked on some big items. Peter Westwood (westi) and Robert Deaton made appearances, and Matt coordinated some of the effort early Wednesday morning.

See you at the next bug hunt! But don’t wait until the next one to contribute to WordPress development.

That is a 234 new tickets, a reduction of the backlog by 122, for total tickets closed of 356 in October. Fantastic results!

Thanks to Matt, Ryan, Mark, Nazgul, Masquerade, westi, Viper007Bond, jeremyvisser, Sewar, filosofo — I am sure I forgot someone, if I missed you let me know.

I am looking forward to another successful month of bug gardening!

Download it (zip, svn), report bugs, and discuss it on the WordPress testers mailing list. If there are no severe issues it will likely be released within about 10 days.

• Ryan announced 2.0.5 rc1 with some notes on the wp-testers mailing list
• Mark details the major changes and areas to test
• Dougal Campbell provides links to dig into WordPress’ trac

It is great to see people blogging that they are already running it, particularly seeing blog posts in so many different languages.

If you are testing it and need any assistance please let me know, or if you want more time to test before we release it.

After we wrap this up, we should be completely focused on WordPress 2.1 with a release targeted for before the end of the year — we will see how it goes.