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Comment by johansch | Hacker News Reader

He/she did address an interesting and touchy subject of software development. It could have been more diplomatic, but then also, I'd say, needlessly watered down.

A challenge in software development has long been the division between test and development.

You could do as Microsoft recently did (more or less abolished "test").. the jury is still out on whether that is what has caused the recent Windows 10 quality issues.

Or you could keep a tester/developer separation. Good luck trying to recruit top (e.g. your testers should on average be as smart as your developers) people for the tester positions unless you are Google/Facebook.

Either way, I think this is a really interesting issue.

It should be noted: some pieces of software are a lot easier to test by its developer (say, a compiler) than others (say a GUI).

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If a person has a good point, it's not like it's hard to abide by the rules here. All it requires is the intention to. Your comment does a fine job.

A glance at a few (edit: random!) users' comment histories is enough to see that this intention (either way) is mostly orthogonal to the topics at hand.

The person is very depressed.

Me?

I'm just more interested in calling out drudgery, propaganda, forced fanaticism of boring topics, and adding color

I've learned that on this forum you need to sugarcoat it.

Adults call it "diplomacy". I'll leave it to you devise your own lexicon to refer to those that use the phrase (preferably with a sneer) "have to sugarcoat everything".

See also: "I'm just saying what everyone else is thinking."

There's plenty of room to be civil without 'sugarcoating'.

MS abolished manual testing (STE) positions prior to Windows Vista being released, somewhere around beta 2 or rc1. Vista probably suffered from this but Windows 7 didn't.

No they didn't. Source: I joined MS after Vista was released and worked with manual testers.

Did they have the STE title or SDET? When this happened it wasnt like there was 100% automation in place so developers, architects, SDETs, had to pick up the slack. I personally got stuck verifying bug fixes for our components (kernel stuff and supporting user mode services) in various languages I don't speak (particularly fun for left to right languages) just to get the bug count down. That team had something like 20 STEs that got the axe post beta 2.

No idea what their titles were but they worked entirely running manual tests. I ran some manual tests myself as an SDET but this was different.

Just a note:

I was referring to both people doing manual testing and doing development of automated testing in the case of Microsoft.

My understanding (from the outside) is a that substantial number of people at Microsoft who worked in those areas were made redundant. From what I could gather the goal was to make the majority of testing automated and have the self test systems be developed by the developer of the respective subsystem themselves.

All of the weird regressions I've seen with Win 10 myself (and read about many people experiencing) matches that story.

My feeling is that with something as complex as a desktop OS that needs to work with the a) the history of Windows releases, b) the history of Windows apps, c) the entire, insanely big spectrum of PC hardware released the past 5-15 years or so you do need an army of relatively highly competent people willing to do lots and lots of manual testing over and over and over and over and over ... again. And of course lots of people to build automated systems.. but you can't really get away from the manual aspect very easily.

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