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Meanwhile at Microsoft (europe.pub)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] 28 points 11 months ago (6 children)

If you are a company the size of Microsoft, you have more than enough resources to test absolutely everything.

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  • [–] 17 points 11 months ago* (2 children)

    You will never have resources to "test absolutely everything". It is ALWAYS about building out personas and deriving tests from those.

    What this tells us is that one of two things happened:

    1. This was not tested at all
    2. The testing harness resets the environment after every check (e.g. "does process close when killed") rather than involving a manual reset (i.e. "close and re-open task manager")

    The latter is a lot more common than you would think since it makes it much easier to automate these harnesses rather than having a human at a VM. But... this is what happens when you don't step through the entire workflow.

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  • [+] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    Well, there may have been a period when MS was trying to improve product quality, and in that time, yes maybe they did have very comprehensive automated testing processes. But before that, up to the time of Windows 7 I guess, their quality was dog shit.

    In the early days, MS was an undisputed monopoly though, and not only did they not test thoroughly, they hardly even tried to fix bugs - the userbase had to take care of that too. Earlier versions of Windows had all sorts of workarounds and 3rd party tools to try and get things to work properly.

    I suspect that once they'd achieved their objective of improving quality, there just weren't the incentives there any more for middle management to allocate resources to things like comprehensive tests.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago*

    Latest news is that Xbox Games Division had been required to aim for a 30% profit margin for the last several years.

    Thats why everything sucks and blew up.

    Thats a fucking insane baseline target.

    Line for next quarter profit must go up, therefore, cut costs.

    This is obvious self destructive in the long run, but that doesn't matter, what matters is C Suite's golden parachutes.

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