WINDOWS 10 UPDATES STILL A MESS

October deadline missed, more bugs found

a goal of two major updates to Windows 10 a year, and it’s already gone wrong. The October update appeared, then was quickly pulled. It had a nasty habit of emptying people’s My Documents folder. It transpires that if you designated a My Documents folder on another drive, the update would clean out the original. A fixed version was readied, but that developed a bug of its own. The Unzip app proved erratic, replacing all the files with the same name without asking, or simply failing altogether.

Fingers are being pointed at Microsoft’s testing process. In 2014, it moved much of this to third parties. The new structure was modern and smart. Waterfall development was out, and Agile was in. No more passing a project down through the line, from requirements, to design, to implementation, to verification. The new way opened Windows development out to the world with its Insider Program, with over seven million members.

All well and good, but the cracks are starting to show. Testing an entire OS of the complexity of Windows is serious undertaking. So many testers create a lot of noise, and not all of the feedback is high quality. To test something properly, you really need to know how it works in the first place. Simply adding more people to the Insider Program won’t help either. The file deletion bug was spotted by more than one tester, and reported in forums, but the right people didn’t get the message. The reports were buried under a mountain of other feedback.

Two major updates a year at specified dates has given Microsoft a hard target that invites the company to over-reach. We like new features, for sure, but we like stable and secure updates much, much more than that.