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> 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. The
by 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 agoI'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.