Just a note: I was referring to both people doing manual testing and doing development of automated testing in the case of Microsoft. My understanding (from t

Just a note: I was referring to both people doing manual testing and doing development of automated testing in the case of Microsoft. My understanding (from the outside) is a that substantial number of people at Microsoft who worked in those areas were made redundant. From what I could gather the goal was to make the majority of testing automated and have the self test systems be developed by the developer of the respective subsystem themselves. All of the weird regressions I've seen with Win 10 myself (and read about many people experiencing) matches that story. My feeling is that with something as complex as a desktop OS that needs to work with the a) the history of Windows releases, b) the history of Windows apps, c) the entire, insanely big spectrum of PC hardware released the past 5-15 years or so you do need an army of relatively highly competent people willing to do lots and lots of manual testing over and over and over and over and over ... again. And of course lots of people to build automated systems.. but you can't really get away from the manual aspect very easily.