Mastodawn

Nate Cull (.social)Sep 6, 2018

Fascinating gems in a Reddit thread on Microsoft's new QA process:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/9czvh0/what_is_microsoft_thinking/e5ep6hr/

via https://www.askwoody.com/2018/the-saga-of-microsoft-testing/

<<When it comes to SDE/SDET at microsoft, they basically make sure builds can be built, not that they meet quality assurance standards. >>

<< They test software for /build compliance/

They don't test for what they used to test for in their QA department. ...

Basically, they are making sure they can put out a loader that itself is not broken. Nothing more. >>

r/Windows10 - What is Microsoft thinking?

400 votes and 207 comments so far on Reddit

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Nate Cull (.social)Sep 6, 2018

And this commenter on AskWoody I think gets to the root of it:

<< The “investment” world is not connected to the “run the business” world, and most certainly not the “deliver quality products” world. That seems to be the root of all this. If you’re a consumer, you want a flawless, high quality product that’s going to deliver good value and last a long time. Most investors, however, want the company they’ve invested in to be ruthless in pursuit of their dividends. >>

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Nate Cull (.social)Sep 6, 2018

<<Full Disclosure: I worked at M$ from 2014-2015.

MS has some very talented programmers. They’re not very common, but they exist. The problem is that the entire company is completely and totally focused on developing an absurd number of new features and products, giving them completely unrealistic deadlines, and then shipping software on those deadlines no matter how half-assed or buggy it is...>>

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Nate Cull (.social)Sep 6, 2018

<< The idea is that everything is serviceable over the internet now, so they can just “fix it later”, except they never do. This perpetuates a duct-tape culture that refuses to actually fix problems and instead rewards teams that find ways to work around them. The talented programmers are stuck working on code that, at best, has to deal with multiple badly designed frameworks from other teams, or at worst work on code that is simply scrapped...>>

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Nate Cull (.social)Sep 6, 2018

<< New features are prioritized over all but the most system-critical bugs, and teams are never given any time to actually focus on improving their code. The only improvements that can happen must be snuck in while implementing new features.

As far as M$ is concerned, all code is sh*t, and the only thing that matters is if it works well enough to be shown at a demo and shipped. Needless to say, I don’t work there anymore.>>

I figured something like this must be happening.

It's just weird.

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Doc Edward Morbius ❌

@natecull Technology is debt.