Microsoft to focus on Windows 10 quality after a buggy year

Microsoft hasn’t had a great time with Windows 10 in 2018. Earlier this year Microsoft delayed its April 2018 Windows 10 update due to last minute Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) issues, and then had to fix desktop and Chrome freezing issues after it shipped to more than 600 million devices. Just last month, Microsoft released its October 2018 Update and was forced to pull it offline after a few days of some users complaining that files were being deleted.

If those incidents weren’t bad enough, last week an engineer mistakenly made a licensing server change that meant lots of Windows 10 Pro machines were suddenly deactivated. It’s been a messy 2018.

I wrote last month that Microsoft was facing a big test of Windows 10 quality, especially as some of these bugs were even reported to Microsoft through its Windows Insider testing program. Microsoft is now listening to the feedback from Windows 10 users, and it’s starting a series of blog posts to be more transparent about how it develops and tests Windows. The Windows 10 October 2018 Update is being re-released today, and Microsoft is planning to add a Windows update status dashboard in the coming year to document how the current rollout is going.

Windows is a complex system to test, as not every machine is the same and components, drivers, and software varies massively across the more than 700 million machines running Windows 10. “With Windows 10 alone we work to deliver quality to over 700 million monthly active Windows 10 devices, over 35 million application titles with greater than 175 million application versions, and 16 million unique hardware / driver combinations,” explains Michael Fortin, corporate vice president of Windows. “In addition, the ecosystem delivers new drivers, firmware, application updates and/or non-security updates daily.”

Microsoft has been criticized with Windows 10 for shifting the way it tests the operating system. In the past, Microsoft used dedicated Software Test Engineer (STE) roles for ensuring quality, but the software giant axed most of these during a huge round of layoffs a year ahead of the Windows 10 release. Instead, it has favored developers testing their own work, or reports from the Windows Insider feedback program.

“We shifted the responsibility for base functional testing to our development teams in order to deliver higher quality code from the start,” explains Fortin. Microsoft changed the focus of validation testing and added customer feedback into the mix. Engineers also “self host” and install the very latest builds of Windows to test new feature changes and bug fixes. “A strong self-host culture is a source of pride for those of us working on Windows,” says Fortin.

Testing isn’t limited to self hosting and Windows Insiders, though. Microsoft also has specialist testing programs with PC makers and even commercial customers to ensure bugs are being found. “Even a multi-element detection process will miss issues in an ecosystem as large, diverse and complex as Windows,” admits Fortin. “Our focus until now has been almost exclusively on detecting and fixing issues quickly, and we will increase our focus on transparency and communication.”

A series of blog posts and improved communication moving forward will be the start for the Windows team, but there’s more to be done to polish up Windows 10 itself. It sounds like Microsoft is aware that it doesn’t need to constantly drop big new features into Windows 10 every six months, and can focus on improving some of what’s already there.

“While we do see positive trends, we also hear clearly the voices of our users who are facing frustrating issues, and we pledge to do more,” explains Fortin. “We intend to leverage all the tools we have today and focus on new quality-focused innovation across product design, development, validation, and delivery.”

Microsoft will share details about this a new “approach to quality and emerging quality-focused innovation” in future blog posts, and we’re expecting to see some changes in the upcoming codename 19H1 update and more coming in the second unnamed update for 2019.

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