[WarOnPrivacy]

> MS fired all testers and scrapped their testing hardware and now they are testing virtually in cloud.

I'm fairly certain this isn't the case. 1) Microsoft still adds Microsoft drivers for hardware; this implies having hardware and people to work with it. 2) Microsoft has a massive base of corp and gov customers buying hosting, surveillance, etc. Widespread issues with Windows would could affect that.

I'll go out on a limb and guess the fired all testers theory arose when the insider program became widely available to the public.

[ThrowawayB7]

There was plenty of news coverage of the Windows test team being eliminated at the time of Microsoft's 2014 layoffs:

"Under the new structure, a number of Windows engineers, primarily dedicated testers, will no longer be needed. (I don't know exactly how many testers will be laid off, but hearing it could be a "good chunk," from sources close to the company.) Instead, program managers and development engineers will be taking on new responsibilities, such as testing hypotheses..."

https://www.zdnet.com/article/beyond-12500-former-nokia-empl...

There were also a lot of insider comments from affected SDETs on the notorious (at the time) Mini-Microsoft blog as well: https://minimsft.blogspot.com/2014/07/18000-microsoft-jobs-g...

The burden of testing software was shifted over to developers after the layoffs. If you check Microsoft's job listings, there isn't even a category for software testing positions anymore.

[muststopmyths]

nope. as indicated by a sibling comment, Microsoft used to have parallel SDE and SDE/T tracks and orgs.

They killed the test org completely around 10 years ago because of course developers can just do TDD and ship an operating system with 30 years of legacy applications/hardware ecosystems around it. Or "telemetry will just tell us what to fix"

Of all the mountains of dumb shit this company has done in the past 10 years, this is actually what killed Windows for the people (like myself) who actually used to like Windows.

Edit: To add sources, I worked at Microsoft years ago and still have friends in those orgs.

[bitwize]

I haven't liked Windows since Friends was still on the air, but even I must concede... the version shortly before they dumped their testing org, Windows 7, was probably the best version they made.

Windows 9x was extensively user tested using mockups made in frickin' Visual Basic; user feedback was incorporated into the next round of mockups to converge on something that was actually easier to use. It was agile development before that was a buzzword. What's replaced that? Just rolling out whatever UI brainfart the design team came up with into the product and using bitching on X (formerly known as Twitter) to gauge whether to keep it?