Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the debugging-the-beast dept.
The Qube writes "As a followup to the in-depth story posted back in February regarding the history and the development of Windows NT, part 3 of the series of articles is now online.
It discusses the software testing procedures inside Microsoft."
Testing is a vital part of programming. Tests should always be written PRIOR to the programming. This allows you to think of problems before they arise. In some sense it seems as if MS is avoiding this by having someone "come over to fix the problem within 20 minutes." HHowever, given the diverse environments there does not seem to be a direct solution for them. The EEC seems to be a huge step forward to finding where code breaks for a given customer but it doesnt solve any security holes (which should have been addressed pre-coding when you come up w/ tests for your software). As for all the joking about MS programmers in this forum so far, i find it kinda rediculous that people do that. People that laugh at the products MS produces really do have to look hard at how THEY would manage and TEST 50 MILLION lines of code. With 50 million lines of code you're looking at virtually an infinate number of tests to run, which is obviously impossible to do. Thus you either have to roll out a product that hasn't been 100% tested because of its size or keep testing and never make money. Since its all about the money you obviously roll out the product and try to patch it as fast as you can when somone does find a bug that got by Q&A and the testers. You need to find a balance between testing a product completely and releasing a product to make money. Its a fine line and MS has done a fairly good job given the size of their code base and the pressure on them from the comsumer to get new products out in a timely way.
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Testing is a vital part of programming. Tests should always be written PRIOR to the programming. This allows you to think of problems before they arise. In some sense it seems as if MS is avoiding this by having someone "come over to fix the problem within 20 minutes." HHowever, given the diverse environments there does not seem to be a direct solution for them. The EEC seems to be a huge step forward to finding where code breaks for a given customer but it doesnt solve any security holes (which should have been addressed pre-coding when you come up w/ tests for your software). As for all the joking about MS programmers in this forum so far, i find it kinda rediculous that people do that. People that laugh at the products MS produces really do have to look hard at how THEY would manage and TEST 50 MILLION lines of code. With 50 million lines of code you're looking at virtually an infinate number of tests to run, which is obviously impossible to do. Thus you either have to roll out a product that hasn't been 100% tested because of its size or keep testing and never make money. Since its all about the money you obviously roll out the product and try to patch it as fast as you can when somone does find a bug that got by Q&A and the testers. You need to find a balance between testing a product completely and releasing a product to make money. Its a fine line and MS has done a fairly good job given the size of their code base and the pressure on them from the comsumer to get new products out in a timely way.