Ask HN: Has Microsoft forgotten how to test software?

5 points by pudgywalsh 26 days ago | 4 comments

This is a serious question.

I've an older Mac with some critical apps that runs a slightly obsolete macOS. This OS version is no longer supported by Edge and Chrome 151+.

This did not stop Edge from auto-updating to a known incompatible version and bricking itself.

One minute I had the browser open; the next, the icon was overlayed with the Ghostbusters symbol and could do nothing but display a dialog explaining that my OS is unsupported.

A fluke once perhaps, but this is the third time this has happened to me with various MS apps bricking themselves.

I'm officially done with Microsoft products. This isn't some annoying bug; this is suddenly and abruptly locking me out of my own computer.

ThrowawayB7 26 days ago |

This is a serious answer: Microsoft dissolved its test discipline in 2014, early in Nadella's reign, in favor of developer-led testing and telemetry based bug detection. The results you can judge for yourself.

jkjjklkn 26 days ago | |

The last time Microsoft wrote decent software was when it displayed "38911 bytes free" to the user. It's been downhill ever since.

d3Xt3r 26 days ago |

> Has Microsoft forgotten how to test software?

Well, yeah. Not sure how you missed the news but it was back in something like 2015 when they got rid of all their SDET roles (Software Development Engineer in Test). Since then, the quality of their products have been steadily declining. And recently it's become even worse with the introduction of AI-generated code.

ColdStream 26 days ago |

Everyday when I come to work it is a case of "How will something Microsoft break today?". It is different everyday, it is always something very silly and petty and small. I am so tired of this crap happening non stop. They are a trillion dollar company and they turn out amateurish crap nowadays.

A few weeks back I was trying to recover an Xbox account using their website. I have never seen a more convoluted, sluggish running interface and web response time than what they have clobbered together. I suspect they must just keep layering software stack on top of stacks rather than keeping everything lean.

Once I got the account recovered, firing up the Xbox is a gamble in if it will work. Either is just hangs as it tries to ping back to MS servers or it just hangs when booting stuff for... reasons. Again, they have had decades to get this right...