The main factor behind the bugginess of recent releases, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg, was the rate at which developers were committing changes — often daily, or at least weekly. These commits proved problematic, however, for other Apple developers. When one code change, or commit, went live (they go live by default in Apple’s coding environment), it often made test builds unusable for a period of time. This limited the amount of time testers could spend with the software and kept developers from fine-tuning feature releases as they were busy fixing bugs instead. In new test builds of Apple’s future operating systems, the features deemed to be buggy, or those that cause reliability issues, will be turned off by default. Testers will then be able to switch them live, at their own risk, thus reducing the amount of bugs in live software. According to Bloomberg: The change was spearheaded by Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software engineering, and announced during an internal meeting.
