Hotfixes that won't install. Errors that wipe out personal files. Delayed update cycles. Hardware that simply doesn't work. There's no denying it: quality control at Microsoft has fallen to pieces, a fact reflected in the many problems Windows 10 has suffered. What causes these failures? YouTuber Jerry Berg, much better known as Barnacules Nerdgasm, worked for fifteen years at the Redmond giant, and shared juicy details about the evaluation processes that Microsoft abandoned and the replacements it uses today.
Windows 10. Personally, I'd love to say we work and play 'with' Windows 10, but four years later I'm forced to admit we work and play 'despite' Windows 10. Every Patch Tuesday comes with a prayer that Microsoft won't break anything during the update process, and honestly, I don't think things have improved much. The internet is full of users describing their problems with the OS (daily!), and Microsoft's official forums are a salt desert.
The underlying question is... why? Why did we get here? Why sacrifice the relative stability of Windows 7 for an operating system transformed into a 'service' that leaks everywhere? To find the answer, we need insight from someone who has walked the trenches of Microsoft in the past, and that someone is Jerry Berg, or Barnacules Nerdgasm on YouTube. With 15 years of experience accumulated at Redmond, here's what he said:
The Good Old Days of Testing
At one time, Microsoft had an entire team of testers dedicated solely to evaluating the operating system. That team was divided into groups, each representing a specific branch or build. Their testing had a high level of automation, but these groups met daily to exchange ideas and determine whether a piece of code was ready for upstream. Moreover, tests were conducted 'on the metal', meaning on real hardware, and under thousands of configurations, some quite exotic.
So far so good, but then came the great purge of 2014, followed by another round of layoffs in 2015, and this hardware team basically disappeared, replaced by the team responsible for testing Windows Phone. Partly, the layoffs were associated with the consolidation of Microsoft's three big divisions (Windows, Windows Phone, and Xbox) into one, but the story doesn't end there: real hardware was replaced by virtual environments.
https://old.neoteo.com/como-limpiar-a-windows-10/Virtualization and Self-Hosting
While we agree that a good portion of an operating system's functions can be explored through virtualization, the idea here is to hunt bugs (rare and common alike), and virtualization doesn't have enough diversity. Microsoft introduced the concept of self-host, so its own employees became beta testers. If they found a bug, it would be impossible to ignore it, because it would drive them crazy. However, self-hosting was also phased out, and now everything depends on telemetry.
That's right, telemetry from Windows Insider builds and standard Windows 10 versions. Now, Barnacules points out that very few Windows Insider users send reports, and that telemetry itself is very limited compared to other classic resources like minidumps (which are also not without issues). Microsoft developers must work with a bug database, combine the telemetry they receive, create the fix, and push it to Insider images to check if it works, or if it causes other problems.
https://old.neoteo.com/como-eliminar-el-stutter-en-windows-10/A Rollout and a Suggestion
Barnacules also takes a moment to explore the strategy shift in distributing major Windows 10 updates. Initially, everyone received the same build, but after some catastrophic incidents (including loss of personal information), the 'rollout' was chosen. In short, Microsoft's entire testing structure is weak, with Insiders and end users turned into beta testers. Barnacules' suggestion? A bit of the old essence (flesh-and-blood testers with real hardware) and more communication with users for critical cases, including requesting full dumps (accompanied by some reward, because sending full dumps is a nightmare).
