[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?