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Comment by thrower123 | Hacker News Reader

Yikes. This sounds, however, like a completely different bug, if it is only triggered by unzipping archives. I'm sure that the situation is more complicated than it looks - because it looks like there is just a shocking lack of QA testing being done, if basic edge cases like this are resulting in undefined behavior.

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I'm astonished Microsoft doesn't have automated tests for something as mundane as testing their built-in zip archive extraction functionality.

I expect there are automated tests, but it's been my experience that automated tests are usually not very deeply implemented. They often test the expected code paths, and new code, with new tests that fail to review the existing tests can often result in regressions that are not caught.

Peter Bright at Ars Technica had an interesting article on the Windows development process, with a tidbit of information I thought was interesting. Apparently it's permitted to integrate code into Windows that doesn't have tests:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/microsofts-problem-i...

I'm going to quote my comment on the original bug [1] here:

> Well, you see, when you fire a whole lot of your OS group's QA department...

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18154679

It's fine, because "automation" automatically finds all the bugs, and developers are evaluated primarily on code quality and test coverage, not on ability to crank out feature code as rapidly as possible.

Perhaps it the type of bug that only happens 497 days[1]? a few of these class of bugs slip through now and then (intiger overflow).

1. https://blog.ctm-it.com/it-support/blogs/matt-cannon/2013/49...

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