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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

#21

Post by dang »

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.)

Re: Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

#22

Post by internetisthesh »

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 same things.

Re: Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

#23

Post by breischl »

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.

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-for...

Re: Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

#24

Post by [deleted] »

georgemcbay wrote: post #17
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.

This was my reaction as well. I've had a lot more serious problems with my Lollipop-updated Nexus 5 than I have with my Windows 8.1 desktop PC over the past month. Software quality in general is IME pretty bad these days and the problems go way beyond just Microsoft.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

#25

Post by dangrossman »

breischl wrote: post #23
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

#26

Post by nutmeg »

My favorite change lately is the one where they increased the version number on System.Web.Mvc in the GAC, thereby breaking almost all old ASP.NET MVC builds.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2014/10/16/microsoft-...

The comments on this article have some great vitriol.

Re: Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

#27

Post by nailer »

josefresco wrote: post #16

I stopped reading when he suggested MS buy Stardock and "call it a day". This is what passes as news/journalistic content at Computer World? And how in the world did it bubble up onto HN? I hold out hope that Microsoft has bigger plans for it's operating system than simply pandering to the tech-media's demands for, of all things... the start menu to return.

The Start8 Windows 8 dock (in windows 8 mode) is more in place with current UI of Windows than Microsoft's Windows 10 one.

Re: Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

#28

Post by georgemcbay »

[deleted] wrote: post #24
georgemcbay wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my reaction as well. I've had a lot more serious problems with my Lollipop-updated Nexus 5 than I have with my Windows 8.1 desktop PC over the past month. Software quality in general is IME pretty bad these days and the problems go way beyond just Microsoft.

[deleted]

That's a good point, but (admittedly based entirely on my own anecdotal experience) I'd argue that much software is now bad in ways that are far less subtle.

While there has never been a time where I haven't constantly been running into software bugs, these days I seem to encounter a lot more situations where the bug is so obvious that it is impossible to believe the company didn't see it during development and so egregious that I can't believe they released the software anyway.

Re: Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

#29

Post by stinos »

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.

This. It's a bit harsh, sometimes arrogant, filled with 'I don't like MS' kind of speak instead of focussing on facts. The article does does state some real problems though, that cannot be denied. However, extrapolating that to a general trend like "there is no QA anymore" (which is at least how I interpreted the article) seems just wrong.

Re: Microsoft has been making quality assurance mistakes lately

#30

Post by bcbrown »

yuhong wrote: post #18
amputect wrote: post #6

This is exactly what I thought would happen when they gutted their QA staff and reassigned the surviving testers as developers. Your employees act in accordance with their incentives, and the incentives aren't there for QA. Microsoft made it clear that they only value feature development and shipping, and their employees now associate "doing QA" with "being fired en masse". To corrupt a phrase, they've crapped their…

I think QA is still rewarded, but it probably will still not be done as well as it was done before. Eg. I wonder if the problems with KB3004394 for Win7 showed up on the dev machines with the test root installed.

I disagree. Back before the reorg and layoffs, there was a clear prestige difference between Test and Dev, where most SDETs were levels 1 or 2 with one Senior per team, while the SDEs had 2-3 times as many Senios, and one Principal per team. It was clear that the ceiling for promotion was much lower in Test.

I left before they began doing away with the SDET discipline, but I'm sure that QA work is still not very prestigious.

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