Why you should almost always write a test app for your Radar bug reports
-
You’ll understand the bug better. This means you can write a better bug report, which will help Apple fix it more quickly (meaning you may get the fix more quickly).
-
They’ll understand the bug better. This, too, helps Apple fix it more quickly.
-
You may find that it is not a bug in the API at all, but that you were misusing it. Perhaps you were using something on a thread that you shouldn’t have been, or expecting some argument to be used a certain way when it’s actually used differently.
In this case, you may be able to use the API after all, saving you the time you would have spent hacking around a non-bug. This also saves them the time they would have spent triaging and eventually responding to a non-bug.
If your misunderstanding was borne out of poor documentation (misleading, inaccurate, vague, incomplete), you can file a bug report about that instead. Then the documentation gets better and future users of the same API avoid making the same error you did.
A test app isn’t appropriate for every kind of Radar, but when it is, including it helps everyone.