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Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

computerworld.com

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Re: Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

#51

Post by mark-r »

dangrossman wrote: post #25
breischl wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously! You never hear about a car would accidentally accelerate when you try to brake, or that the tires would spontaneously blow out, or that they would just plain roll over. I mean, the phrase "automobile recall" is practically an oxymoron! [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius_(XW30)#Recall [2] - http://www.forbes.com/2000/08/18/mu3.html [3] - http://www.cbsnews.com/news/toyota-will-recall-lexus-suv…

The fact that "automobile recall" is something that exists and is expected when defects occur, but "software recall" largely does not exist, was his point.

I worked for a company that did a voluntary software recall once. That was back in the days when it meant shipping out CDs.

Re: Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

#52

Post by bcbrown »

mikestew wrote: post #49
jaxbot wrote: post #5

The title seems to apply to Apple, too (see iOS and Yosemite WiFi bugs), and could probably be applied to Google, too (Hangouts bugs, Lollipop problems, etc). But mistakes happen and many bugs are less obvious to reproduce than others, so I wouldn't point fingers too hard, personally.

Having worked on and off in software testing for the last fifteen years or so, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that there's a correlation between the recent trend of calling software test teams "Quality Assurance" and general purpose software that seems to get less stable as time goes on. Bear with me on my admittedly whacky theory that I haven't completely fleshed out yet. What is called "quality assurance" is r…

I totally agree. What I think Test should mean includes testing the spec and acting as a user advocate; testing the design spec to ensure the dev is considering all relevant scenarios and cases; manual UI testing (and scenario-based API testing) to find the corner cases; writing test automation and scaffolding to catch regressions; and writing test automation using combinatorial techniques to cover as much of the input space with a minimal number of test cases.

Now that I'm a dev I really wish I had some competent testers to work with. It's really impossible to test your own work, because you're inherently optimistic about your code. Testers need to have the mindset of "there's a bug in here somewhere, and I'm going to find it."

Re: Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

#53

Post by dang »

towelguy wrote: post #38
dang wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we consider that and similar ideas from time to time, but I worry about unintended consequences.

Just a plain log would do.

It's the unintended consequences of a plain log that I worry about.

Re: Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

#54

Post by Retra »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #12
jaxbot wrote: post #5

The title seems to apply to Apple, too (see iOS and Yosemite WiFi bugs), and could probably be applied to Google, too (Hangouts bugs, Lollipop problems, etc). But mistakes happen and many bugs are less obvious to reproduce than others, so I wouldn't point fingers too hard, personally.

If a car blew up and left you stranded whenever you filled it with gas, or unlocked its doors whenever you left it out in the rain, you'd demand a refund and perhaps compensation. It's a testament to the usefulness of lawyers that the big players in the software industry don't even pretend they can work at the level of professional and managerial competence offered by almost all other consumer and B2B industries.

Well, if my car did that, I would just back up, reformat, and reinstall. So I don't see why the auto industry puts that much effort into preventing problems that are so easy to fix. It's not like you're in danger or anything -- just use some cheap redundancy.

Re: Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

#55

Post by Retra »

mark-r wrote: post #50

My own WTF moment came recently when we dropped XP support for our product. Suddenly the window frames started painting improperly. One of the system calls we use in NCPaint returns different values depending on whether the executable is marked as XP compatible or not, even with no other change to the program. How are you supposed to create reliable software when you can't even count on the raw API that's been unchan…

They go through a lot of effort to make sure their software is backward compatible. (You're not supposed to make reliable software, you are supposed to make broken software and convince your customers to pay Microsoft to make it work on their systems.)

Re: Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

#56

Post by Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd »

exelius wrote: post #14
sjm-lbm wrote: post #7

Unless I'm missing something, this article really seems unreasonably harsh. He cites two bad updates within the past months (one for Windows 7, one for Exchange) that have had to be pulled due to issues, but it seems like well over half the article is devoted to complaints about patches for Windows 10 - an (officially) unreleased product.

Yeah, this article is FUD. The Windows 10 piece is stupid - it's a pre-release OS, these things happen. It's why they haven't released the OS yet, so I'd say their QA process worked. Pre-release OSes don't go through the same level of QA - if you don't like it, you should use a supported OS. Second, with Exchange updates, there's kind of an unspoken understanding that there is no way MS can test every scenario their…

How long can you responsibly run Exchange on the internet after a security patch was released? The recent Drupal SQL injection [1] showed that attackers have databases of fingerprinted services, just waiting for an update that shows them how to exploit these systems. Reverse engineering the binary patches for Exchange and building a reliable exploit out of them probably takes longer than it did in the case of that SQL injection in Drupal. But how long a testing period is too long?

1: https://www.drupal.org/PSA-2014-003

Re: Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

#58

Post by frik »

dang wrote: post #21
frik wrote: post #15

I found it a bit irritating that there were no news about the various Microsoft update issues on HN last week. The article at least mentioned the various problems, that's good. Some articles that capture the whole timeframe: http://goo.gl/eOaCX3 http://goo.gl/c8PJ3W http://goo.gl/PzxJPX http://goo.gl/ozN3zT

> I found it a bit irritating that there were no news about the various Microsoft update issues on HN last week. Why didn't you post one? (Edit: I hope that didn't sound accusatory; I mean it as a cordial invitation to post good stories that you think belong on HN.)

I read about it only in german IT news portals like http://www.heise.de .

I really like HN, it replaces /. for me.

Therefor I try to not submit controversial posts (is it in US?). I assume it's not optimal to submit Google Translate links of german articles (like my links above).

Re: Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

#59

Post by teh_klev »

Corvus wrote: post #10

Ordinarily I would brush off complaints about prerelease alpha software quality. But the same problems are affecting mature flagship products. Last month a Microsoft Visual Studio update intercoursed all our Azure development machines. We never got any reply from Microsoft, and had to reimage all the machines. I see from https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/... this has nearly a dozen repos, an…

Forget Connect. It's a barren dustbowl full of tumbleweed. If it's urgent shell out for a PSS support issue. Can't remember what we pay per "urgent/high priority" incident but it's small potatoes compared to waiting around for a response on Connect.

I've emailed Scott Guthrie a couple of times in the past about the sorry state of Connect. Maybe they'll just shoot it in the head and stop pretending it's useful to anyone.

Re: Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

#60

Post by teh_klev »

internetisthesh wrote: post #22
snarfy wrote: post #20

I've been using Visual Studio since it was called Visual C++. VS 2013 is one of, if not the buggiest versions I have used. The only responses I seem to see are "It'll be fixed with Roslyn, just wait!" I'm curious as to what has shifted inside Microsoft. Part of me believes I'm seeing the work of new devs as the old devs have left. Another part believes this is the result of agile taking over. I liked my visual studio…

Interesting, I use VS2013 with C++ and C# all days and rarely have any issues. In my team with 10 devs the only guy who run into problems often is the one who installs all extensions he can find (his VS looks like my mothers IE with all the toolbars). Compared to how often VS6 crashed for me in the late 90s and how buggy VS2003 was, VS2013 feels pretty solid to me. Guess we are not using it in the same way or for the…

I agree, 2013 is pretty solid and feels a lot snappier compared to 2012 and 2010 (I have all three installed).
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