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Comment by iEchoic | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft used to have separate roles for dev and test/QA (SDE and SDET), and is a good case study here. Sometime around 2013-ish, they merged the SDET role into the SDE role, and made SDEs responsible for automated testing and quality. This was widely recognized as an important decision that improved both product velocity and quality by time I had left a couple years later.

I don’t think this is an anomaly. Every engineering team I’ve been on since has given this responsibility to the developers writing the code, and every one has been stronger for it.

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Maybe it enhanced velocity, but I can tell you that for sure it did not improve quality for Office, Windows, or Visual Studio (not Code). I work with all of those products, and have worked with them before and after the big layoff. The quality of those offerings took a serious hit when they outsourced QA to their customers.

I try to submit feedback and half the time the feedback tool itself fails to work, the other half of the time my bug is closed or ignored so that the team can 'focus on issues with a broad customer impact'.

Is there any evidence that Microsoft's product quality has improved recently? The only way I can imagine justifying that point of view is if you divide by the cost to get that quality, which is a useless metric to me as a customer.

Maybe I just experience bugs that no one cares about, but I no longer recognize Microsoft Office or Windows as solid software given the massive increase in the volume of bugs I experience.

I have friends who have worked for Microsoft for ~20 years. I'm a small-business IT consultant.

My MS friends have the feeling that it was a painful transition, yet ultimately a good thing, and that quality has gone up.

My experience on the ground, so to speak, is the exact opposite. The May(!) update still has showstopping bugs with a not-small portion of my clients. Last year, one was bitten by the wipe-the-user-folder upgrade bug. The trust in running windows updates is at an all-time low amongst the general users, and I can't blame them.

I trust my friends. I also trust my own experiences. I wonder where the disconnect is?

> "This was widely recognized as an important decision that improved both product velocity and quality by time I had left a couple years later."

I'm sure that's what the execs say at the all-hands meetings but ask the former MS SDETs who still use MS products and you'd hear a much different opinion. ;)

My standard quip when hitting yet another bug in a MS product, which is an all too frequent occurrence nowadays, is "Gosh, maybe MS should consider hiring some SDETs."

Maybe they should apply QA to MS Teams. I have to restart the app many times a day to get it to work.

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