4 ms·

Telemetry is important if you've gotten rid of, you know, the QA teams MS had in the past

bradford 10y ago
Can't tell if you're being tongue-in-cheek, but that was kind of the problem. The cost it took to do QA for Windows was immense, and even with an army of testers, there were still highly embarrassing (and very expensive to fix) flaws in the product all the time. Windows had to find a cheaper solution or die a slow death in the market. Earlier I said "Products that don't incorporate [telemetry] are going to be clobbered by products that do". High QA costs are the biggest part of this.
- dingaling 10y ago
  > The cost it took to do QA for Windows was immense As it should be when you're developing an OS for 90% of the market across a huge variety of hardware. There's really no way around that, and jettisoning QA teams as a cost-saving response is incomprehensible to me. Trusting telemetry alone to ensure the robustness of your product will result in a "good enough to ship" focus on mainstream work-flows and leave corner-cases unaddressed since they're rare. And corner-cases are where the bad, system-breaking things happen. Telemetry should help QA people write mundane automated test-cases to cover the 99% and then enable them to go and spend the constructive part of their time focusing on breaking the system. But it's absolutely not a replacement for QA.
  - bradford 10y ago
    I'd say that 'jettisoning QA teams' is a mischaracterization. The role is still filled, it's just evolved a lot since the windows 8.1 (and prior) era. Similarly, I'd say that 'Trusting telemetry alone' is also a mischaracterization. From where I sit, both roles are combined. The output is a far smoother engineering process and a higher quality OS. You mentioned 'corner cases [being] unaddressed' but I've witnessed the exact opposite: most of the criticism I hear about Win10 has nothing to do with quality.

Can't tell if you're being tongue-in-cheek, but that was kind of the problem. The cost it took to do QA for Windows was immense, and even with an army of testers, there were still highly embarrassing (and very expensive to fix) flaws in the product all the time. Windows had to find a cheaper solution or die a slow death in the market. Earlier I said "Products that don't incorporate [telemetry] are going to be clobbered by products that do". High QA costs are the biggest part of this.

dingaling 10y ago
> The cost it took to do QA for Windows was immense As it should be when you're developing an OS for 90% of the market across a huge variety of hardware. There's really no way around that, and jettisoning QA teams as a cost-saving response is incomprehensible to me. Trusting telemetry alone to ensure the robustness of your product will result in a "good enough to ship" focus on mainstream work-flows and leave corner-cases unaddressed since they're rare. And corner-cases are where the bad, system-breaking things happen. Telemetry should help QA people write mundane automated test-cases to cover the 99% and then enable them to go and spend the constructive part of their time focusing on breaking the system. But it's absolutely not a replacement for QA.
- bradford 10y ago
  I'd say that 'jettisoning QA teams' is a mischaracterization. The role is still filled, it's just evolved a lot since the windows 8.1 (and prior) era. Similarly, I'd say that 'Trusting telemetry alone' is also a mischaracterization. From where I sit, both roles are combined. The output is a far smoother engineering process and a higher quality OS. You mentioned 'corner cases [being] unaddressed' but I've witnessed the exact opposite: most of the criticism I hear about Win10 has nothing to do with quality.